Cloudflare Must Block 'Piracy Shield' Domains and IP Addresses Across Its Service

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In a landmark ruling, the Court of Milan has ordered (PDF) Cloudflare to block pirate streaming services that offer Serie A football matches. The court found that Cloudflare's services are instrumental in facilitating access to live pirate streams, undermining Italy's 'Piracy Shield' legislation. The order, which applies in Italy, affects Cloudflare's CDN, DNS resolver, WARP and proxy services. It also includes a broad data disclosure section.

The Court of Milan's decision prohibits Cloudflare from resolving domain names and routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the 'Piracy Shield' system. This also applies to future domains and aliases used by these pirate services. The order applies to Cloudflare's content delivery network (CDN), DNS services, and reverse proxy services. The order also mentions Cloudflare's free VPN among the targets, likely referring to the WARP service. If any of the targeted pirate streaming providers use Cloudflare's services to infringe on Serie A's copyrights, the company Cloudflare must stop providing CDN, authoritative DNS, and reverse proxy services to these customers. (Note: This is an Italian court order and Cloudflare previously used geotargeting to block sites only in Italy. It may respond similarly here, but terminating customer accounts only in Italy might be more complicated. )

Finally, the order further includes a data disclosure component, under which Cloudflare must identify customers who use Cloudflare's services to offer pirated streams. This should help Serie A to track down those responsible. The data disclosure section also covers information related to the 'VPN' and alternative public DNS services, where these relate to the IPTV platforms identified in the case. That covers traffic volume and connection logs, including IP-addresses and timestamps. In theory, that could also cover data on people who accessed these services using Cloudflare's VPN and DNS resolver. The court ordered Cloudflare to cover the costs of the proceeding and if it doesn't implement the blocking requirements in time, an additional fine of 10,000 euros per day will apply.

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