EFF, CloudFlare Ask Federal Court Not To Force Internet Companies To Enforce Music Labels’ Trademark

mirimir · Jun 19, 2015

This month, CloudFlare and EFF pushed back against major music labels’ latest strategy to force Internet infrastructure companies like CloudFlare to become trademark and copyright enforcers, by challenging a broad court order that the labels obtained in secret. Unfortunately, the court denied CloudFlare’s challenge and ruled that the secretly-obtained order applied to CloudFlare. This decision, and the strategy that led to it, present a serious problem for Internet infrastructure companies of all sorts, and for Internet users, because they lay out a blueprint for quick, easy, potentially long-lasting censorship of expressive websites with little or no court review. The fight’s not over for CloudFlare, though. Yesterday, CloudFlare filed a motion with the federal court in Manhattan, asking Judge Alison J. Nathan to modify the order and put the responsibility of identifying infringing domain names back on the music labels.
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The order that CloudFlare received in May is an example of another facet of the site-blocking strategy. It works like this: entertainment companies file a lawsuit in federal court against the (possibly anonymous) owners of a website they want to make disappear. The website owners typically don’t show up in court to defend themselves, so the court issues an order to the website to stop infringing some copyright or trademark. (Often this order is initially drafted by the entertainment companies.) The entertainment companies then send a copy of the order to service providers like domain name registrars, Web hosting providers, ISPs, and content delivery networks like CloudFlare, and demand that the service providers block the targeted website or domain name, as well as other websites and domains that the entertainment companies want gone.
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/...force-internet-companies-enforce-music-labels

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EFF, CloudFlare Ask Federal Court Not To Force Internet Companies To Enforce Music Labels’ Trademark

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EFF, CloudFlare Ask Federal Court Not To Force Internet Companies To Enforce Music Labels’ Trademark

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