Very Confused Judge Allows Bizarre Copyright Lawsuit to Continue

techdirt.com

8 points·eastdakota··2 comments

CloudFlare runs a (free!) reverse proxy that obfuscates the identity (e.g., IP address) of servers that sometimes host copyright-infringing material.

As a copyright holder, your only choice is to request a DMCA takedown to CloudFlare. There may be no other way to identify the host than to ask CloudFlare, as they pass all traffic to the host.

CloudFlare responds that they are not the host of the material, merely a "CDN" or "reverse proxy". Perhaps they respond with the identity of the host, perhaps not.

If they do not, how are they not contributing to copyright infringement? And even if they do identify the source IP of the host, how does their obfuscation of the host not provide some direct (contributory) benefit to the host for distributing copyrighted content?

the point of cloudflares service is to make content faster to access by hosting it closer to you. that requires that the content is available on a different ip address. this is not obfuscation but purely a side-effect.

obfuscation would be to put the content on a different location without any other benefits. that's what the use of a vpn achieves (in the other direction). people use a vpn to obfuscate their ip address. cloudflare does not provide their service to obfuscate a hosts ip address.

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