Court of Milan orders Cloudflare to block ‘piracy shield’ domains, IP addresses
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Currently streameast and such have the best UI for watching sports games and it's not even close. Casual/nascent fans don't want to pay $100 a month for announcer-less access to sideline camera feeds. I don't want to look up where every game is streaming that week. I don't want a membership to peacock or whatever to see this one game I'm sorta interested in. No I don't have cable anymore either. I don't care to understand how "blackouts" work. It goes on an on.
It seems maliciously bad. And their numbers are showing it. From Gen Z's low adoption rates, to lower rates of onboarding new fans and broadly reduced viewership in some sports like the NBA.
I don't know a single person who pirates music these days.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...
That sounds very over the top, but I don't know enough about the US, NFL or TV to dispute that.
For La Liga (or F1/MotoGP for that matter) you can at least get away with a ~30 EUR/month subscription to see the games, with various providers. Is there really not one network broadcasting/streaming all the games somewhere?
The rights to each “day” of games then get sold off separately. So right now Thursday games are on Prime, Monday games are on ESPN+, and Sunday Night games are on Peacock. Generally the steaming services want to use the games as an onboarding tool, so they are not available anywhere else and you have to subscribe to their whole streaming service, not just the games.
There is a service called “NFL Sunday Ticket” but it only lets you watch the games that aren’t available to you in some other way (so if it’s on Prime it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket for anyone and if it’s on old-school antenna broadcast it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket if the broadcast is too close to you).
To watch all of the NFL games you’ll need:
- Prime
- ESPN+
- Peacock
- Cable/Antenna/Fubo/YouTube TV (for home-team Sunday games)
- NFL Sunday Ticket (for other Sunday games)
(Or you can just pirate them, which is cheap and easy.)
because watching every single NFL game is over the top. people watch their team's games, and maybe whatever else is on if their team isn't playing. they don't watch every game ever. except for a few hardcore weirdos, and $2500 is a reasable price to pay if you're that into it.
streaming rights are a mess, and there's certainly room for it to be a lot more user-friendly. but watching every single game isn't a useful metric.
I'm not much of a football fan, really only following my local team and one other. But now I watch the highlights of almost every other game on YT.
I'm not so sure. I can easily get access to all La Liga matches for waay less than ~$2,500, and the same goes for most non-American sports I care to watch sometimes. I was even surprised how easy it was to get HBO Max to watch every single Olympic event this year, think it cost 15-20 EUR in total or something. For reference, this is for a Spanish resident, so YMMV.
La Liga and Bundesliga are both on ESPN+ in a single sub, all Serie A and Champions League matches are on Paramount+, all MLS matches are on Apple+, etc.
NBA is dead to me. NHL is fine but not worth paying for. Not a big NFL fan and I'd buy MLS if it were unbundled from AppleTV+. I'm not paying for both.
Just one man's opinion.
1. $2500 is one year of cable + streaming services required to watch every football game. If you don’t have cable it’s $1700.
2. $1700 is the cost to maintain all of those services year round; the regular season + playoffs is 5 months long
It’s probably more like $800, which is still a lot, especially when they’re already monetizing the product by shoving ads down our throats every 30 seconds (though it’s a different “they”)
That's no longer the case. NIL is paying out hundreds of thousands to millions for 18-21 year olds in College Football[0] (don't know how much other sports get, but they get paid too) unless they are in a state that bans it (not sure if there are still hold outs) or the military academies, but they are a different breed entirely. It's basically minor league pro football now.
[0] https://collegefootballnetwork.com/top-10-nil-deals-in-2024/
I take it that you also don't watch any scripted TV shows or movies either? "millionaire (actors) acting for billionaires (producers/production companies)" is a reasonably accurate description of how such programming are produced as well.
Why would they lower their profits? Even services like YouTube TV eventually catch up in price with regular cable.
Because doing so is likely to make the total profits $0 in the future as it makes each generation less interested than their parents were.
It’s kinda the same though. If I want to watch Interstellar, I won’t settle for Gravity because it’s what Netflix has. If I want to watch Interstellar and it’s not on Netflix or Prime Video, I’m going to pirate it.
https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
This is maybe the most obvious example but ridiculous things like seasons of TV shows being split across different streaming services is incredibly common.
Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service
Really, I see no downside to this court decision.
Uh... https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-...
There actually had been some attempts to make smart guns mandatory while not completely working out all of their "kinks" yet. But to your point they actually have attempted this, to some degree. At first they were thinking only to prevent police from having their weapons used against them, but they had attempted to expand the scope. Although after the cops didn't want it either and the push for them seems to have waned.
Internet companies aren't being asked to proactively block piracy sites either. They're asked to block IP addresses associated with known piracy sites, as determined by the courts.
>Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
...only because the government aren't nervous about "ores and parts" getting in the hands of criminal or rival states. For many other items, suppliers are required to seek export licenses for certain goods[1], which is arguably an equal or higher bar than what you're describing. Such items aren't limited to stuff like explosives or munitions, it also includes benign stuff like certain metal alloys, and semiconductors. Also, Banks and other financial institutions are required to proactively look for sanctions evasion activity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
There’s ample precedent for requiring companies to stop serving known criminals, and for requiring them to do some basic checks to try to avoid doing it in the first place. Just look at all the trouble that state-legal-but-federally-illegal marijuana retailers have with the financial system.
There are services where this is not expected. The post office delivers the mail regardless. But I don’t see why Cloudflare would be one of those universal services.
This seems like a typical tech company thing where they act like they have an inherent right to scale. If they actually checked what their services were being used for then they could easily spot this stuff and shut it down, but that costs money and takes time.
Yes, civil forfeiture would be absurd if it weren’t a farce of force.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
I think intellectual property laws need radical overhaul and reduction, and I think the current iteration is based on shakey philosophical principles anyway, but you won't get very far with straw men arguments, over-reductionism, or bad legal advice.
>>> . . . worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common
>> On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
> Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit?
Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see:
$ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100'
242 MIT
277 LGPL
348 GPL
381 BSD
| 1 | MIT | 44.69% |
| 2 | Other | 15.68% |
| 3 | GPLv2 | 12.96% |
| 4 | Apache | 11.19% |
| 5 | GPLv3 | 8.88% |
| 6 | BSD 3-clause | 4.53% |
| 7 | Unlicense | 1.87% |
| 8 | BSD 2-clause | 1.70% |
| 9 | LGPLv3 | 1.30% |
| 10 | AGPLv3 | 1.05% |And it's one place where you can directly specify your intent. In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.
Varying durations for different types of media should be discussed as part of copyright reform. But simple statements like "10 years" reveal that people haven't thought things through.
Look, I'm no lawyer, but my broader point is that something like that might not make much if any difference to most. It doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the MIT license and public domain. The MIT just requires attribution and propagation of the license text.
If you add up the MIT licensed projects with others that have similar licenses, you might get to a 51%, at least according to the GitHub stats. I would think most of these people just picked a license by what other people picked. They don't really, really care to put the particular restrictions they did.
I'm not saying that 10 years is a good number, or that licenses are bad. I'm just saying that your pick of FOSS might be a poor example to argue about the need for long copyright terms.
The only ones among the FOSS community that likely care to have long copyright terms are those that pick GPL-type licenses, which have more substantial restrictions to ensure the freedoms of end-users.
It also effectively turns GPL3 to GPL2 on a rolling 10 year basis.
People freaked about Tivo 20 years ago. Now imagine what kind of chaos Nvidia and Oracle could cause starting from even Ubuntu 14 or a 3.18 Kernel.
Stop promoting your faves, stop generalizing about the motivations behind your non-faves, and to paraphrase John Lennon: imagine no licensing.
Now think a little deeper how that would change the motivations of developers, massive corporations, and VCs. Especially those that have given little but lip service to the whole movement.
For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.
1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.
If you had to submit source code to the copyright office to be granted a copyright, and it expired after ~10 years (at which point the source is published), and anticompetitive, anticonsumer hardware locking methods were illegal, you'd be looking at a reasonable trade again, and copyleft would be essentially redundant.
If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.
A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.
At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.
If proprietary code had to be released read-only a year or two in advance of becoming public domain you'd have basically the same effect, but I would not expect the effect to be very big.
I'm not sure that's the right line for society, but it's my personal line.
Both examples aren't exactly clear lines. The walmart example arguably affects "actual human beings" by raising prices, or at the very least, making the shopping experience worse. See: stores in the US where anything vaguely high value is locked up and you need to call an employee over to open it. The car window smashing example could result in no economic loss for the owner, if the owner has comprehensive 0 deductible insurance, or if the car is a company car. There's also plenty of activity that we ought to ban even if there's no "actual human being is harmed", eg. speeding, or tax evasion.
Clearly no human being is harmed by smashing the windows of a private car. (assuming that neither the smasher nor anyone else gets hurt in the actual act of the smashing.) As a first order of approximation no human got harmed, they weren't even there when their car's window got smashed. As a second order approximation obviously we know the private car's owner will need to replace the windows which will cost them.
At the same time shoplifting from Walmart is also a cost which is born by everyone who shops at Walmart. Walmart will put that cost into the price of items. They will also put the cost of anti-theft items in the price of things too. Plus those anti-theft measures will harm the non-thieves by inconveniencing them. So everyone will pay just a bit more because of the shoplifting. These costs and inconveniences add up quickly.
Why is one of these costs within the line and the other is outside the line? What makes one of them "actual human being is harmed" while the other not?
In the same way, paying hundreds of dollars to fix a broken window is a significant burden to the individual owner. Paying an extra dollar on my Walmart bill is much easier to absorb.
So to take a recent example from my city (one of those cities so full of rampant petty theft that stores now inconvenience everybody by locking up toiletries), you don’t have a problem with this rich asshole with a $150,000 salary and his two disrespectful, disruptive teenagers stealing steaks and Monsters from Walmart?
Companies which import storage media (e.g. DVDs) pay levies which are meant to be paid out to the rights holders. These rights can be asserted through collecting societies, e.g. Suissimage for filmmakers.
https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar...
Interestingly the article right after that one is about the "decoding of computer programs" and says: Any person who has the right to use a computer program may obtain, either personally or through a third party, necessary information on the interfaces by decoding the program code using independently developed programs.
It is in this way that Cloudflare is bad. It's bad for consumers being blocked because Cloudflare doesn't like their browser, IP, or local weather (because who the hell knows exactly why they're being blocked), and it's bad for businesses too: both competing CDNs that can't compete with CF's scale, and businesses that rely on CF but will be hit with a monopoly-sized price increase once Cloudflare's competition is extinct.
Besides that, Cloudflare is pretty aggressive with their captchas/blocks, and there been times where I, a resident of Spain, been blocked out because it's impossible to pass their captcha. I either have to give up and find some alternative service doing the same but without Cloudflare, or I try again another day and suddenly it works.
And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.
Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client
>Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]
...including piracy sites
>DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks
>Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.
See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on.
People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.
Would strongly recommend Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”
I don't care what AWS offers because there's no way I'm venturing into that for my simple domains.
Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.
Already some sites are blocking people that use VPNs, I could also see this expanding as time goes on.
Unsure about the state of affairs in Iberia, but the TFA is about Italia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_di...
For recent usages on HN see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Initialism?
If that's correct, it may work. But if that's not the case - it only makes things worse.
So what did the EU achieve? I still access unavailable services via TOR/VPN, these laws still don't protect me and US companies are still not liable.
Laws only work if you have enough power to enforce them.
Yes, that's what I suspect. And that's why blocking even more online resources is not a working approach. It just won't have any positive effect.
> So what did the EU achieve?
Well, my guess would be weakening of their political institutions. Passing laws that aren't supported by large swathes of the population, and that won't be consistently enforced is a battle-tested recipe component for undermining a democracy.