Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

Blocking is the wrong terminology here. Cloudflare is not an ISP which fetches whatever you ask for from third parties. It's a company contracted by the web site owners to distribute their websites. It's much more accurate to say that Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites in the UK.

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.

See https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo... : I'm slightly surprised that this hasn't caught up with them too. It used to be important to stay somewhat "below the radar" when pirating, not creating an account at one of the largest internet services. But then anti-piracy enforcement is about money and going after soft targets.

> It's much more accurate to say that Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites in the UK.

I understood from the article that it was for users in the UK, not for hosts in the UK.

The implied parentheses were intended to be "(Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites) in the uk" not "Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for (pirate sites in the uk)".

> Blocking is the wrong terminology here. This is geo-blocking, by definition.

Personally, it's always sad when a company agrees to censor on their own merit when they don't have legal obligation to.

> > Blocking is the wrong terminology here.

> 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.

sad how your take is one of the only sensible ones in this thread

Most of the world doesn't bother playing whack-a-mole with pirate sites because it usually doesn't work. The UK, however, is no stranger to enacting policies that are known to be ineffective.

There are court orders here; it doesn't look voluntary to me.

> 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).

So I am not blocked from buying a game based on my geographic location, I am merely restricted from it based on my region...

Yes? I agree "geo" and "region" are synonymous here, but as I understand the word "blocked" to be "blocked" a transaction has to be in action in the first place - and if one party to the transaction (steam) isn't interested then the transaction wasn't in action.

Similarly you can block a punch, but not if it was never thrown.

If requests to their DNS servers were being denied, would you call that blocking?

Are they themselves denying DNS requests whose purpose was to assist in communicating with them? No. They are just choosing not to communicate with whomever sent the request.

Otherwise, probably yes.

well, it certainly seems to be effective in this case

for a whole two weeks probably

Cloudflare offers Tor access for free. So to access these sites in the UK you just need to connect via Tor now. (Or of course you could pay for a VPN, but Tor is free).

https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/onion-routing/

Copyright laws don't prevent people from engaging with their own culture. They just insist that users pay what the creator wants. Any person who is willing to pay can engage as much as they want.

It's like saying that laws against shoplifting prevent people from eating food at a supermarket.

Not so, there is no obligation on copyright owners to sell at a reasonable price. If you want to create a derivative work that the copyright holder ideologically disagrees with it is very likely that it is simply impossible to purchase the rights to do so. Nor is there any obligation for the copyright owner to make themselves known and available to negotiate with, there are numerous things that aren't available at any price because no one even knows who has the right to sell them (many old games for instance fall into this category).

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.

Oh please. Don't dig yourself deeper. So what if the copyright owners set what you think of as an unreasonable price? In almost every case, those works are not part of the collective culture you celebrate. If the creator doesn't want to share, who cares? That's their perogative-- and there are plenty of other perfectly nice works that are made by people who are desperate to share. So please don't use this looney point as an excuse to steal.

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 don't see any discussion on the claim that cloudflare is acting as a host. Are they?

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.

I'm not digging at all, this is a position I feel very confident in defending. I could do without your condescension though.

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.

> I don't see any discussion on the claim that cloudflare is acting as a host. Are they?

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).

I refer to that kind of content availability as geo-locking. Geo-blocking is specifically for blocking internet access based on the client's locality.

cybermania.ws is hosted on cloudflare, has been down for 3 days in a row; it deceptively says 'Verification is taking longer than expected. Check your Internet connection and refresh the page if the issue persists.' It is inaccessible apparently globally, including here, Canada, and via VPN, tor, etc...