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Cloudflare does not remove anything in response to DMCA takedown notices unless it permanently stores the content on its network. However, the company will release the personal data of customers to copyright holders who obtain a subpoena from the DMCA. During the first half of 2021, civil subpoenas targeted hundreds of customers linked to more than 35,000 domains.
Popular CDN and DDoS protection service Cloud flare It has come under a lot of pressure from copyright holders in recent years.
The company offers its services to millions of sites. This includes multinationals, governments, but also some of the major pirate sites in the world.
Not all rights holders are happy with the latter. Some have accused Cloudflare of facilitating copyright infringement by continuing to provide access to these platforms. At the same time, they call in the CDN service for masking the true hosting locations of these 'bad actors'.
Cloudflare sees things differently. The company positions itself as a neutral service provider that does not "host" any infringing content. They simply transmit information that is temporarily cached on their services.
Identification of 'infringing' clients
This means that if copyright holders submit DMCA takedown requests to Cloudflare, the company takes no action other than to forward the DMCA takedown notices to their customer. The customer can then take action, if appropriate.
Not all rights holders agree with this approach and some have lawsuits filed to hold Cloudflare accountable. Others have gone to court to obtain DMCA subpoenas, which require the CDN provider to hand over all the personal data it has about allegedly infringing customers.
We periodically report these DMCA citations, which are intended to torrent sites, streaming sites, and many other pirate portals. In its latest transparency report, Cloudflare reveals how many accounts and domain names were affected.
Citations point to 35,382 domain names
The report shows that during the first half of 2021, the number of target domains skyrocketed. The subpoenas, which include DMCA subpoenas, targeted 35,382 domain names. For comparison, 'only' 79 domains were targeted during the same period last year.
Based on these numbers, it might be easy to conclude that copyright holders are increasing their enforcement efforts, but that's not necessarily the case. In fact, the number of civil citations Cloudflare received during the six-month period increased only slightly.
During the first half of 2021, Cloudflare received 45 subpoenas and the company responded to all of them. Together, they affected more than 325 Cloudflare customers. A year earlier, the company received 31 subpoenas, targeting 548 accounts.
To comply with the subpoenas, Cloudflare may share the IP addresses that were used to access the site, as well as the login times. In addition, it can deliver other 'basic subscriber information'.
โThese basic subscriber data would include the information that our customers provide at the time they register for our service, such as name; Email address; physical address; phone number; the means or source of payment for the service, โwrites Cloudflare.
Delete and block requests
Previously, the courts ordered Cloudflare to block specific sites but no new orders came in during the first half of last year. The company responded to multiple DMCA takedown requests. In these cases, the reported content is stored on the Cloudflare network.
These regular DMCA takedown requests targeted 32 accounts and 367 domain names during the reporting period. This is a significant increase compared to the previous year, when 4 accounts and 4 domain names were affected.
In addition to copyright issues, Cloudflare also responds to other enforcement requests, including seizure and trade warrants and search warrants. These have also gone up over the years.
These increases are not really unexpected as Cloudflare has grown its business significantly, the company explains.
"While there has been a steady increase in the number of law enforcement requests since our first transparency report in 2013, this is partly due to the exponential increase in the number of Cloudflare customer domains during that time period." .
A copy of Cloudflare's Full Transparency Report is available through the company's website. official Web site.
