![]() The court explained that Cloudflare’s services were not necessary to and did not “significantly magnify” any infringement. The district court rejected that claim, holding that merely providing CDN and pass-through security services to the websites did not make Cloudflare responsible for their alleged infringement. Rather than pursue their claims against the website operators, their hosting providers, or any of the numerous other service providers necessary to their business, the plaintiffs targeted Cloudflare, seeking to hold us liable for contributory copyright infringement on the grounds that the websites at issue used our CDN and pass-through security services, most of them for free. In a quirk of US copyright law, most fashion designs are not copyright protected, while pictures of those designs can be protected. The plaintiffs in the case sell wedding dresses online, and they asserted that other websites illegally used their copyrighted pictures of the dresses while selling knockoff dresses. Cloudflare, Inc., the United States District Court for the Northern District of California rejected one such lawsuit, granting Cloudflare’s motion for summary judgment and concluding that no reasonable jury could find Cloudflare liable for the alleged copyright infringement at issue. So it’s not altogether surprising that plaintiffs are sometimes tempted to try their luck suing Cloudflare. Add in the fact that statutory damage provisions in the United States copyright law were not written with the Internet in mind and seemingly allow for the possibility of astronomical damage awards when content is transmitted online at scale. Infrastructure service providers like Cloudflare are not well positioned to solve problems like online infringement.Īlso, while we cannot prevent online infringement, we’ve set up abuse processes to assist copyright holders address the issue by connecting them with the hosting providers and website operators actually able to take such content off the Internet.īut the combination of decades-old copyright statutes and rapidly innovating Internet services has left some copyright holders believing they might have a viable claim against us. We don’t host the content of the websites at issue, we don’t aggregate or promote the content or in any way help end users find it, and our services are not even necessary for the content’s availability online. Over the years, copyright holders have sometimes sought to hold Cloudflare liable for infringing content on websites using our services. Reliable user-space stack traces with SFrame
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