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Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

(torrentfreak.com)
234 points gloxkiqcza | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.512s | source
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gpm ◴[15 Jul 25 15:59 UTC] No.44572526[source]▶
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.

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xhkkffbf ◴[16 Jul 25 15:30 UTC] No.44583394[source]▶
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.

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gpm ◴[16 Jul 25 16:40 UTC] No.44584292[source]▶
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.

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1. xhkkffbf ◴[16 Jul 25 19:36 UTC] No.44585993[source]▶
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?

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2. gpm ◴[16 Jul 25 20:22 UTC] No.44586424[source]▶
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.