I understood from the article that it was for users in the UK, not for hosts in the UK.
Personally, it's always sad when a company agrees to censor on their own merit when they don't have legal obligation to.
> This is geo-blocking, by definition.
Do you also refer to steam games that only sell in some regions as "geo-blocking"? I don't. Steam doesn't (they call them region restrictions). There's no blocking going on, merely declining to offer something in the first place. Cloudflare is the host here, they aren't blocking anything, they just aren't providing the pirate site in the first place.
> when they don't have legal obligation to.
While I know relatively little about UK law I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloudflare does not have a legal obligation to not knowingly host websites committing copyright infringement.
So I am not blocked from buying a game based on my geographic location, I am merely restricted from it based on my region...
Similarly you can block a punch, but not if it was never thrown.
Otherwise, probably yes.
It's like saying that laws against shoplifting prevent people from eating food at a supermarket.
Moreover it is simply unacceptable to say that poor people (which in many cases here means less than multi millionaires given the minimum deal size most copyright holders are interested in for derivative works - and less than centi-millionaires if we mean "affordably as a hobby") cannot legally engage with the work of the culture they grew up in.
And really, your point about poor people is true about everything. Why shouldn't they get free food for life just because they "grew up" eating? Or a free bicycle because they rode one when they were five?
I'm not excusing theft. Theft involves depriving someone of something that belongs to them, copyright infringement never does that. I'm also not advocating for copyright infringement, I'm advocating for doing away with the laws that establish copyright in the first place (I'd accept various other positions like "amend the time limit on copyright down to a year" - though I'd argue there's not much point to retaining copyright at all at that point).
The relevant question is "what are the odds a particular work is part of my cultural background", but "what are the odds that a particular work in my cultural background is copyrighted without a license to create derivative works available either freely or under fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms". Those odds are approximately zero, everything is copyrighted these days, licenses to create derivative works are almost never available for notable cultural works (or really anything other than open source software, and wikipedia).
If you're a kid growing up Pokemon, and not part of the 0.001%, you can't afford a license to legally make up stories involving Pokemon. That's fundamentally unjust. Being able to tell stories about our experiences is fundamentally something that we should be entitled to do.
This isn't the case of a nominal, affordable, cost like food. We absolutely hold that food should be available to everyone at a price they can afford (and yes, if they can't afford it we should still feed them - see various UN resolutions and so on about food being a human right). This is the case of "you can only do this legally by making bespoke negotiated business-to-business style deals for huge sums of money" when it should be a right widely available.
The status quo is just that people break the law and make themselves criminals (intentional copyright infringment is a crime, and that's what you do when you write "fanfiction" without a license), and that's not right.
Usually we only describe the last link in the chain as the host. Everything else is usually not "the host" for a website. DNS providers, TLD registries, Domain registrars, IP address providers, VPNS, reverse proxies, web caching, CDN (which often, but not always, act as caches), DDOS protection, IT management layers, micro services, backups, IP management, (and many more) do not call themselves hosts for websites. The ones that call themselves as host are usually web hosting providers, web shops, "cloud", and vps. Hardware as a services seems like a bit more of a grey zone, similar to rented space in a data center.
The article specify that the pirate shops used cloudflares services of pass-through security and CDN. The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked. How shocking that is depend on how much responsibility we as a society want to place on people who provide those kind of services. How much liability should a service provider have, say a security management services, when their customer is known to break local law?
Reminds me a bit of the specific case law in Sweden used in the pirate bay case. The law that the prosecutor used was a law directed toward biker gangs that targeted the bars that those gangs tended to use as a base. The law specified that even if the bar itself operated legally, the fact that the biker gang used it as a base made the owner legally liable if the bar provided services to those members.
This is definitely how Cloudflare attempts to defend themselves! In essence, my above comment is rejecting Cloudflare's interpretation.
They aren't a preliminary step in the chain like DNS/domain stuff, they are the final step, they are the service the user asks for the actual content of the pirate site, and they return the actual content.
They aren't a tool being used by the user like an ISP or VPN that might have a privacy defence of being deliberately blind to the traffic they are forwarding, they are rather specifically contracted by the pirate site.
There's no expectation on the users behalf that when they query the pirate site hosted by cloudflare that query will go beyond cloudflare (like with a proxy). The user is perfectly happy if cloudflare serves that request entirely by returning data stored on their own servers. So is cloudflare, and as much as the time as feasible that's exactly what cloudflare does.
So I'm rejecting the notion that cloudflare is distinct in any relevant way from a typical webhost here.
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> The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked.
I'd be happy if the title read "court blocks Cloudflare from providing services to pirate sites" (though that's not the editorial slant the article was going for). Your phrasing leaves the blocking party ambiguous, which is sort of missing the point of my complaint.
If you mean "this services has been blocked [by Cloudflare]" like the original title, it runs into the same problem as the original title. You've changed the party Cloudflare is declining to transact with from the end-user to the pirate site. It's still the case that this is merely Cloudflare declining to provide services, not those services being blocked (which would only be possible if Cloudflare chose to provide them) by Cloudflare.
The distinction here matters because this isn't Cloudflare acting as an extension of law enforcement to step in and block a crime from occurring, this is merely Cloudflare itself choosing not to commit the crime. Maybe because a court ordered them not to, or maybe just because they decided not to (which the article seems to be trying to suggest).
The shocking part of this isn't that they aren't participating in that form of crime in the UK, it's that they're somehow able to participate in it in the rest of the world.
And I say this as someone who thinks that copyright laws are largely unjust, preventing people from engaging with their own culture, but that doesn't make them not the law.