Cloudflare Blocks Pirate Site URLs “For Legal Reasons”

Cloudflare is actively disabling access to some pirate site URLs on its network, informing visitors that the requested pages are unavailable for legal reasons. While these types of ‘HTTP 451’ error messages are relatively rare, they are nothing more than Cloudflare complying with its legal obligations under the DMCA.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

cloudflare logoCloudflare, a global internet infrastructure company, offers various services to millions of users, including connectivity and privacy tools.

While primarily a conduit for internet traffic, Cloudflare occasionally hosts content permanently on its servers.

The company’s approach to copyright complaints differs based on the role it plays. If Cloudflare merely passes traffic along (for a website using their CDN), they forward DMCA takedown notices to the actual hosting provider, which is often hidden from public view.

When Cloudflare actually hosts reported content, it will remove or disable access to it, following the procedures set forth in the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 512(g).

Cloudflare Copyright Takedowns on the Rise

Historically, Cloudflare hasn’t hosted much content. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the number of takedown requests for this type of content has been rather minimal, averaging between 1 and 3 reports per year between 2018 and 2020.

In the years that followed, this number started to pick up. According to Cloudflare’s latest published transparency report, the company received 376 DMCA reports in the first half of last year. More recent data is not available yet.

Cloudflare DMCA Reports

cloudflare dmca

In addition to the transparency report, which is published with a delay of more than a year, Cloudflare also started sharing takedown requests with the Lumen Database. These are updated weekly, and suggest that the takedown volume is growing.

Pirate Sites Targeted

Thus far, Cloudflare has shared more than 2,000 takedown notices publicly, most of which are from 2024. These notices target URLs from Cloudflare pages, Images and R2, including links that are typical pirate sites, such as yts.cx, ytsmovie.cx, limetorrents.unblockedstream.online, and movielair.cc.

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, for example, reported several domain names that are currently blocked by local court orders. Through these notices, the group asks Cloudflare to inform the website owner and the hosting company to shut these sites down.

“This letter is to a) inform the owner of the Website of the infringing and illegal character, with the demand to immediately cease the operation thereof, and b) inform the hosting provider concerned of the infringing and illegal character, demanding to immediately cease its services in relation to this website,” the notice reads.

Takedown notice

brein cloudflare

These types of notices are not new. Cloudflare has received complaints for many large pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay. In this case, however, Cloudflare appears to be involved in hosting.

HTTP Error 451

Takedown notices for passthough services are not recorded as valid takedown notices. In hundreds of recent instances, however, Cloudflare did take action, replacing the reported URLs with an HTTP error 451 notice.

Unavailable For Legal Reasons (Error 451)

error 451

The HTTP 451 Error code was invented for situations where content is made inaccessible for legal reasons. Cloudflare uses this for DMCA takedown removals, linking these to the Lumen Database reports.

For example, the yts.cx link to a pirated copy of “Bad Boys II” is made inaccessible by Cloudflare, honoring the takedown request. This is a targeted intervention, as all other yts.cx URLs remain accessible.

The same applies to the URLs of other pirate sites that are presumably hosted by Cloudflare. The company makes the reported URLs unavailable, as requested, while keeping the other URLs untouched. The 451 error notice is Cloudflare’s way to inform the public that it complied with a copyright complaint.

In addition to the classic pirate site URLs, Cloudflare also made plenty of other content unavailable, including streaming sports stream playlists reported by beIN, and an infringing Zelle Pay app.

The full extent of Cloudflare’s presumably increased takedown activities remains unknown, but the company’s forthcoming transparency reports are expected to provide more details.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Latest James Webb data hints at new physics in Universe’s expansion

These latest findings further support the Hubble Space Telescope’s prior expansion rate measurements.

Physicists have been puzzling over conflicting observational results pertaining to the accelerating expansion rate of our Universe—a major discovery recognized by the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. New observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has confirmed that prior measurements of distances between nearby stars and galaxies made by the Hubble Space Telescope are not in error, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. That means the discrepancy between observation and our current theoretical model of the Universe is more likely to be due to new physics.

As previously reported, the Hubble Constant is a measure of the Universe's expansion expressed in units of kilometers per second per megaparsec (Mpc). So, each second, every megaparsec of the Universe expands by a certain number of kilometers. Another way to think of this is in terms of a relatively stationary object a megaparsec away: Each second, it gets a number of kilometers more distant.

How many kilometers? That's the problem here. There are basically three methods scientists use to measure the Hubble Constant: looking at nearby objects to see how fast they are moving, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes or neutron stars, and measuring tiny deviations in the afterglow of the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, the various methods have come up with different values. For instance, tracking distant supernovae produced a value of 73 km/s Mpc, while measurements of the CMB using the Planck satellite produced a value of 67 km/s Mpc.

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