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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

> That said, this raises the question of how the IPFS gateway is different from Cloudflare’s DNS resolver, which essentially operates as a gateway to the regular Internet. Cloudflare previously said that it will fight copyright-related DNS blockades, even if they’re backed up by a court order.

> Apparently, that’s not the case for IPFS.

But it’s also not the same situation at all.

With DNS, blocking would mean making the whole site unavailable.

With their IPFS gateway they are just filtering individual items.

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I'm not a lawyer but my guess is it has to do with the liability of transferring "illegal" content. There's no content crossing Cloudflare servers for DNS resolutions but there definitely is for IPFS.

For IPFS vs CDN, I'm guessing relevant copyright laws give a service provider an out when it's a well-defined user/customer doing the copyright-related redistribution; no such agreement exists for content on IPFS.

EDIT: Trying to read the relevant DMCA sections and precedent makes me happy I'm not a lawyer. Cloudflare was previously sued for copyright infringement (Mon Cheri Bridals, LLC v. Cloudflare, Inc.) and found not guilty. In Cloudflare's own blog about the decision, they said the suit was meritless for several reasons including "our services are not even necessary for the content’s availability online." My guess is there is sufficient ambiguity over whether operating a inter-protocol gateway puts them at increased legal liability.

> There's no content crossing Cloudflare servers for DNS resolutions but there definitely is for IPFS.

Unless I'm missing some magical internet tomfoolery, that's not the case when you use their DNS proxy service, right?

As far as I understand it Cloudflare's DNS proxy service is for it's authoritative DNS service (and therefore only transfers content of Cloudflare customers), while the parent referred to the DNS resolver (1.1.1.1) where arbitrary sites are looked up.

I think what you call "DNS proxy service" is what I'm referring to as their CDN. As referenced by a sibling comment, I meant their public recursive DNS resolver service when I said "DNS resolutions."

No, I'm not. I'm talking about the ability to completely hide your IP address from both DNS and network traffic.

Ahh, you mean Cloudflare Tunnel then?

That's their CDN with a twist.

They probably mean the copyrighted material isn't crossing their servers. Unless you are somehow encoding it in DNS records...

For DNS specifically, it is analogous to saying a phone book shouldn't be liable for listing the phone number of someone who sells pirated DVDs.

Particularly curious since they also provide a Web3 gateway. While not copyright related does hosting/deploying a smart contract make them liable for possible illegal activity such as securities and state dept regs?

Guess I could just try deploying tornado-cash..

> With DNS, blocking would mean making the whole site unavailable.

The site is still available, just not through its DNS entry.

> With their IPFS gateway they are just filtering individual items.

They can filter as broadly or as targeted as they want.

True. For the IPFS case they're not recording the IP addresses for possible blackmail. But that's just an idea.

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