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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

If someone is running a meth lab on the property only accessible by your private road, and you know about it...you're complicit in the crime. Also, because of Cloudflare's reverse proxy you can't see who their host is, and with private registration you can't see who is behind it all. You have to go through a huge legal obstacle course just to prevent your customers from being scammed when Cloudflare could literally just flip a switch. Google will remove scam ads from its platform, though it doesn't host the websites behind them...it's basically the same thing. It's a means of operating the scam.

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> If someone is running a meth lab on the property only accessible by your private road, and you know about it...you're complicit in the crime.

Uh, no I am not. It is illegal to landlock someone, this is a pretty common thing in rural areas.

Let’s say I purchase all of the property between person X and the highway. Well, he has to have access to it so I have to give him a right of way. But that doesn’t make me the police. He’s responsible for what he does, not me.

Or, if you think this is a grand idea, I think landlords should be responsible for crimes committed by tenants. If you make that a co-condition of these ridiculous IP laws they’d all be dead and gone in a week…

In the US landlords do have some liability for criminal conduct on their property whether committed by tenants or others.

Most web services do have strict restrictions on conduct. This is a far cry from vigilantism.

It’s messed up for Cloudfare to wash their hands of any responsibility here.

I'll tell you what the difference is, that no one ever points out...

In the case of a crime being committed in a hotel room, the criminal is the nuisance. The hotel operator gladly participates with law enforcement to remove the nuisance. In the case of something as ridiculous as these plaintiff wedding dress makers claiming "intellectual property" over a white dress, the plaintiff is the nuisance, not the people they are accusing.

This.

There are numerous accounts of illegal activity at hotels, hostels, government sanctioned housing, college rental properties, and any privately owned, leased property, but no one, ever has been held accountable for illegal behavior (like domestic violence, illicit drugs, underage drinking, etc), so why should a SaaS?

OP has done the equivalent of alerting the front desk of illegal behavior taking place in their hotel. At that point they have an obligation to act. What hotel goes "Duly noted about the drug dealer in 302. He does pay for his room though so we aren't going to bother him."

If that illegal behavior does not seem to be likely to harm either the room or other guests, I feel like the people who are saying that not only "the correct thing" for a hotel to do here but "what I expect most hotels to actually do in this situation" is to, if they do anything, at most alert local law enforcement and cooperate with them if there is an issue, not decide to send hotel employees to go run an internal investigation to verify the activity even is illegal in the first place, after which point I guess the idea is you want to send the bell hop and the concierge and the night security officer to go evict them from the hotel?... This just isn't how anything is done and is asking the wrong things of the wrong people leading to situations that are super dangerous for everyone involved.

Meanwhile, it isn't even "in the public's best interest" for the hotel to act as law enforcement as the most they can do is evict the person from their one hotel, not actually stop them from doing whatever "illegal behavior" is taking place. (At this point, apologists for monopolies probably start arguing that this is why we are all better off if everyone is forced to use one or two providers, so that everyone can be forced to fall in line with whatever the new corporate vigilante justice rules are... sigh.) Law enforcement is empowered, trained, and equipped to actually do something, not the hotel staff.

>if they do anything, at most alert local law enforcement and cooperate with them

And cloudflare isn't even doing that. They just shrugged and decided they would continue to collect profit off the criminal behavior and act as a brick wall for OP in this case. They don't have to be the law enforcement here, but they should be obligated to report this activity to law enforcement and let law enforcement do their jobs. OP will probably have to get a lawyer and spend a lot of money and time to force cloudflares hand to turn in the phisher, all while their business is being hurt directly, and that's just not right at all.

Their responsibility is to report illegal behaviour to the proper authorities, not to confront them or kick them out.

edit: spelling

And they aren't doing that in OPs case. Just continuing to profit off the phisher and shrugging their shoulders.

Interesting analogy, it fails pretty quickly though once you take a deeper look

Your analogy amounts to a person having a private road, for which a random person comes buy proclaiming "hey there is meth lab up your road" from this you then jump to the conclusion that the person that owns the road now legally "knows" about the meth lab, thus if a methlab is found they are complicit.

I would find this to be very lacking from a legal standpoint that some random person yelling an accusation at you constitutes "informing" someone of a fact to whit they would then become legally liable.

No proof, evidence, or other actionable noticed has been given, so the owner can simply ignore you accusation and move along with their day, in fact legally that would be the best course because if they then investigated they could become complicit, but at the moment of accusation they are not

It’s not as simple as knowing that they’re using the road. In the US, they are forbidden from using the road only if you have denied them access to the road through either clearly posted no trespassing signs at quarter mile or less intervals or notified them either verbally or in writing that you are denying them access, and if no easement protects their access through your property to theirs, etc. So you would not only have to know, but have good reason not to deny them access other than to ignore or protect them of your own uncompelled free will.

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