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.

> 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.

> 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...