Broadest US Pirate Site Injunction Rewritten/Tamed By Cloudflare

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: After causing outrage among online services including Cloudflare, the most aggressive pirate site injunction ever handed down in the US has undergone significant weight loss surgery. Now before the court is a heavily modified injunction that is most notable for everything that's been removed. It appears that Cloudflare drew a very clear line in the sand and refused to step over it. The injunctions granted extreme powers, from residential ISP blocking to almost any other action the plaintiffs deemed fit to keep the sites offline. Almost immediately that led to friction with third-party service providers and the situation only worsened when a concerned Cloudflare found itself threatened with contempt of court for non-compliance. The CDN company fought back with support from Google and EFF and that led the parties back to the negotiating table. Filings in the case last week suggested an acceptance by the plaintiffs that the injunction cannot be enforced in its present form. The parties promised to work on a new injunction to address both sides' concerns and as a result, a new proposal now awaits the court's approval.

With the contempt of court issue behind them, Cloudflare and the plaintiffs appear to have settled their differences. An entire section in the injunction dedicated to Cloudflare suggests that the CDN company is indeed prepared to help the video companies but they'll have to conform to certain standards. Before even contacting Cloudflare they'll first need to make 'reasonable, good faith efforts to identify and obtain relief for the identified domains from hosting providers and domain name registries and registrars.'

If the plaintiffs still need Cloudflare's assistance, Cloudflare will comply with requests against domain names listed in this injunction and future injunctions by preventing access to the following: 'Pass-through security services, content delivery network (CDN) services, video streaming services, and authoritative DNS services, DNS, CDN, streaming services, and any related services.' An additional note states that the plaintiffs acknowledge that Cloudflare's compliance 'will not necessarily prevent the Defendants from providing users with access to Defendants' infringing services.' Given the agreement on the terms, the amended injunction will likely be signed off by the court in the coming days. Service providers everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief while rightsholders will have a template for similar cases moving forward. The proposed amended injunction documents can be found here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pdf).

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