alt Hacker NewsI'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.
I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.
Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system
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It's unreasonable to expect cloudflare etc to be able to proactively identify legal vs illegal streams. The companies who own the copyrights can't even get that right much less a third party that has no idea if a stream is licensed.
It did go through the legal system. That’s what forces the block.
How much of a responsibility should the provider have to scan what they're hosting and proactively make a judgment on whether they should block it or not?
> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content
Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome?
In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.