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Comment by netdevphoenix | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Cloudflare allowed itself to be use like this and is heading to court instead of just refusing to accept LaLiga's requests. They could just request them to provide appropriate evidence and make them pay for the time Cloudflare staff would need to review the evidence

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Cloudflare isn't in a position to accept or decline LaLiga's requests; LaLiga, supported by a ridiculous court order, is forcing ISPs to block Cloudflare IP addresses.

Cloudflare absolutely is in a position to take down domains they're hosting on those IPs while keeping other domains sharing the same IP up.

I think that's probably what they'll be doing in the end, so it's interesting to observe that they haven't done so already. Do they maybe have at least an internal domain reputation system so that long-time customers mostly share IPs with other long-time customers and are less likely to get caught in the crossfire?

> Cloudflare absolutely is in a position to take down domains they're hosting on those IPs while keeping other domains sharing the same IP up.

They could. On the other hand, why should they? I would much rather see them fight this court order and make it stop across the board.

Cloudflare's customers are distributing copyrighted material. That's basic copyright law, and the host and distributor can easily take it offline after a court request.

Your response assumes I want to see sites distributing copyrighted soccer games taken down, rather than cheered on.

The courts are unlikely to cheer on such websites, though. For better or worse, copyright law exists in Spain, and it will be enforced either with Cloudflare's co-operation (Cloudflare blocking infringing websites) or without (ISPs blocking Cloudflare IPs).

What I'm hoping for, here, is a case along the lines of "this court order has been used irresponsibly, with no regard for collateral damage, and has blocked sites such as GitHub, X, Y, and Z, which have nothing to do with the purpose of the court order; the court order should be rescinded".

According to another commenter here, the court order specifically stated that unrelated websites should not be blocked, so La Liga is potentially in breach of the court order, and could be on the hook for a lot of money in damages, should the injured parties decide to pursue it.

Bit of a strawman, yea? Copyrighted material is flung from one end of the Earth to the other from thousands of places and you want to single out a single entity? How's that 3rd grade education working for ya?

Ok, this explains why Cloudflare is doing this. So the issue seems to be with the court order then. Is this then yet another case of court order makers not understanding the technological consequences of the court order they made?

Or more likely not caring, or not being informed because the plaintiff doesn't care about collateral damage.

I suspect that LaLiga lawyers and lawyer-techs aren't perhaps the most technical so when they learned to figure out IP's they made it their go-to way of working without even considering that they might need to contact CF (or Github that also seems blocked in Spain).

Finding abuse contacts is actually a M:N problem for the entire industry since we skimped on IPv6 (Had we gone to IPv6 providers like CF could've just assigned customers their own IP's and third-party fallout would've been minimal).

LaLiga went directly to the courts, according to Cloudflare.

Well, I'm guessing here but I assume pirates are happy to stand up a new website for every match. And LaLiga wants the sites taken down within the ~90 minute duration of the game, otherwise what's the point?

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