I set up a site around 20 years ago - now on https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ - and got threatened with a lawsuit by Dannon / Danone. I had to give them the first domain because it was a trademark (but not before I'd set up a 301 redirect and let Google catch up with the change). That was in more innocent pre-DCMA times when corporations wouldn't really know how to contact an ISP and get something banned without getting lawyers involved. I enjoyed a realtively long email correspondence with what I hope was a very expensive lawyer from Danone.
Edit: I set up the site on bifidusdigestivum.com after getting too irritated by adverts where they talked about their amazing bacteria "Bifidus Digesivum", which was just so ridiculous I found out as much as I could about it and wrote about it in as SEO-friendly a way as possible so anyone searching for it found my site. It's had something like 1.5m views since then, and still gets 400-500 visits a month. Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but it still gives me a chuckle every now and then when I remember it.
Yeah, it was kind of weird - pretty sure the positive comments about it weren't organic, but there are some other anti comments that didn't feel quite right either. I'm not even sure if the comment section works any more!
> Senk immediately felt the takedown was bogus. His site was obviously parody, which he felt should have made his use of the CrowdStrike logos—altered or not—fair use. He immediately responded to Cloudflare to contest the notice, but Cloudflare did not respond to or even acknowledge receipt of his counter notice. Instead, Cloudflare sent a second email warning Senk of the alleged infringement, but once again, Cloudflare failed to respond to his counter notice.
I am generally a fan of Cloudflare and I think they are good players and good people, but this is something they really need to fix. The DMCA system is already heavily stacked against the little guy. The least Cloudflare (or any host) can do is listen to both parties. Ideally they should be a neutral arbiter.
I use Cloudflare extensively and spend a lot per month with them, but this really gives me pause about whether I want to have CF hosting my actual content. I've never had a DMCA takedown claim against me, but I know people who have been abused by that process. It can really happen to anyone.
Cloudflare, please don't be part of the problem. You've long been a champion of a more open web, one in which little people can operate. You've done more to enable creators like that than just about anyone I can think of. Please, don't be a facilitator or enabler for the DMCA bullies.
Funny how companies (not only Cloudflare) are super-responsive when it comes to forwarding takedown notifications from other companies, but drag their feet and "forget" when it comes to doing the same for counter notifications, even though both are required by the DMCA. Also, funny how (to my knowledge) no company has been criminally prosecuted for filing a false DMCA takedown notice. Likely because you have to prove intent. The law is comically stacked against the little guy.
I regularly receive DMCA outside of America, which I wished I could reply to "your law doesn't apply to me, cite the right one in my jurisdiction or get lost".
But I can't.
Because my hosting will process those by default and shut my sites down unless I just comply to the take down, no matter how legitimate it is.
It can be even a bogus take down from a US point of view, or even a take down for a non existing content.
Doesn't matter. I have to show that I comply, or 48h later, my server is shut down.
Check the terms of service and the acceptable use policy of your host; even if the DMCA doesn't apply to you directly, it would apply to a U.S. based host, and you agreed to their terms when you became their customer.
You're aware hosting companies can have locations in multiple countries but still be controlled by a parent company in the US? So if the US parent company doesn't play ball, that has the potential for downstream issues in the other hosting locations. Easier/safer as the company to just play ball. If you're so concerned about this, find a host based and run solely from a safe country and not controlled by a US-based entity.
Your hosting company is bound by US laws. Their defense for hosting illegal content is the DMCA, which allows them to claim that it is your responsibility (the end-user's).
This is the entire point of DMCA: exempt service providers from indirect liability for content on their network (at the cost of taking action for that content upon receiving notice).
If DMCA applied to them but not to you, how could that possibly work? A US company could host content that no one is responsible for?
In other words: this is not about you but about your hosting company. They are the ones the DMCA apply to, and was written for. This is true no matter where you live, if your hosting company is US.
You think it's reasonable for companies worldwide to be bound by US law? Companies doing business in the US, sure, but random hosting companies? Do you also expect US companies to honor takedown requests according to North Korean law?
If your hosting provider is in the EU, the Digital Services Act shields them from liability for hosting illegal content, provided they respond swiftly to takedowns, which is why they do.
The DMCA is the United States implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organizations treaties. So there likely is an equivalent statute in your jurisdiction.
It doesn't matter. DMCA is an implementation of the IP protection (and a very biased one). While the treaties might agree on the principles, fortunately most other countries don't have an equivalent mechanism. "Yet.", a pessimist would add.
Is this actually true? I was under the impression that the DMCA came first and then similar stuff was put into WIPO treatries but not necessarily ratified or fully implemented in the domestic copyright law of other countries.
Not really sure what the point of this comment is to be honest. Other jurisdictions didn’t simply copy and paste the DMCA. OP’s desire to be threatened in terms of the regulations that they’re actually beholden to is completely valid. Because, spoiler alert, international treaties aside, not every implementation is as terrible as the DMCA.
Upon receipt of a counter notification, the DMCA obligates them to wait at least 10 business days before restoring the content to give the original party an opportunity to sue first.
Which is one of the big problems with the DMCA, it effectively lets companies/individuals shut down those they don't like at critical points without any court involvement with effectively no negative consequences for abusing that. It's an extremely biased law, even compared to how unfair copyright is to begin with.
I disagree that Cloudflare is super-responsively following the DMCA takedown notice requirements. The DMCA requires them to respond to a takedown notice by expeditiously taking down the content, and to a counter-notice by restoring the content. Instead, they responded to a takedown notice by forwarding it to their customer, along with a commitment to wait for 72 hours before taking anything down.
The original notice was not a DMCA takedown even if Buttflare's email describes it as such. DMCA is for copyright infringement, but this is a (claimed) trademark dispute.
Without Cloudflare, a lot of the internet sites you use daily would have had to give up rather sooner than later.
The dream of a free and equal Internet died on the day shitheads could rent 0wned devices for ddos attacks for 10$ an hour in bitcoin. There would have been a tiny window where governments could have stepped in and demanded that ISPs follow up and act on abuse reports, but Obama on his last legs didn't have the power any more and Trump didn't care.
Ideally, there would be an FCC regulation requiring ISPs above 500 customers have a time frame of two hours between getting notified of an attack originating from their network, investigate it, and cut off the other party unless they had shown evidence of effort to be a better netizen. That would also have led to economic pressure on Microsoft and other vendors (looking at you Java) to actually make their products more secure.
Countries can still just as well step in now, there is no window that has passed.
However, swift shutdowns not involving a court would be the wrong way to do it - as wrong as the DMCA is. All that is needed is appropriate consequences for bad behavior, including those shielding bad actors.
Courts are not customer support, the court system is already massively overloaded as it is.
I agree that courts have their place, in this case to provide an appeals solution if someone remains blocked by their ISP despite provably not being a bad netizen. But they cannot shoulder the load of policing - in the meatspace, that's done by police, in the digital space the ISPs are the closest equivalent.
The problem is that Cloudflare is the company that protects those that do the ddos atacks. Their whole existence as a company depends on there being a healthy market for ddos attacks.
Kick off all ISPs which refuse to do good ingress/egress filtering. Kick off all customers which absolutely positively need to be completely exempt from the filtering because of their ultra special snowflake networks, when creating source spoofed abuse a couple times. So now you have an internet with reliable source IPs. Allow ISPs for their customers to push firewall rules blocking abusive traffic to the originating ISP, subject to some fair use rules. If an ISP's firewall slows down because they are overloaded with rules for obvious abuse from their customers ... well that's working as intended then.
It would be nice if there was some sort of system in place to resolve attacks at the source. Sounds like a really hard problem though. Based on reports ISPs can identify which routers are causing problems. With more invasive routers they might even be able to identify the specific devices. Then I guess they inform the customer via email or something? What happens if customers don't do anything about it?
Also what's to prevent attackers from sending tons of bogus alerts to ISPs to muddy the waters and undermine the entire system?
This is exactly how you get hosting providers threatening to nuke your server if you don't respond in an unreasonably short time even though there is nothing actually wrong with it. No thanks.
Hence why I mentioned that ISPs have to, gasp, hire people to investigate. Someone complains about portscans or has indicators of a server being compromised? That is something the ISP can easily verify on their own.
Cloudflare gave up neutrality when they terminated Daily Stormer. Before that, there was even discussion if they have technical ability to terminate single site like that (deleting content from distributed store is hard).
More political activism they do, more damage for them!
It's political activism to terminate service over TOS violations?
It was pretty simple really - all they had to do was not lie about Cloudflare endorsing them (per the contract that had extremely standard boilerplate language about such things).
People seem to get really upset when Nazis are held to the same basic contract law standard anyone else would be held to. Just because the politics of promoting hate makes it hard to find vendors, it doesn't mean that vendors need to make a special TOS just to coddle those that do.
“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” [CloudFlare CEO Matthew] Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
I do not know background of that. But Stormer at some point also endorsed Hilary Clinton (as a satire). I could imagine they were trolling BBC or CNN, that compared Cloudflare to nacist, for not censoring them.
Hosting something that doesn't break your local laws or your ToS is as neutral as it gets. Not hosting something because you don't agree with them - is not.
In this case, they broke ToS and got removed from CF.
I'm sorry, if a place has a "do not shit of a floor" in its ToS, you go there and get kicked out because you shat on the floor. What is political about it?
If you really want to argue on this, then go with "ToS are complicated for mortals to understand".
> Isn’t the operative question here, what should the ToS include in the first place?
No? It's a private company. You can choose to agree or not to agree with ToS and therefore make a choice of using or not using service because of its ToS.
Another thing that you can complain about: CF clearly wanted to boot them off the service (see CEO's interview) and found a clause in their ToS to do so.
You're describing a philosophy called Free Speech Absolutism. It's a perfectly reasonable stance and I get where you're coming from, but it is not objectively more correct than any other approach. And it's definitely a choice with political implications.
What if Kamala Harris used cloudflare in front of her website? Is cloudflare now supporting the Democratic party? What if Trump did? Same thing?
By your logic, it seems like cloudflare would have to review the content of every page on every site and only host it if they agree with it. That's going to mean a pretty big chunk of websites don't get hosted.
You really don't think a neutral position would be to just not care what the content is, and just host everybody regardless who they are, what they believe, etc?
A peer comment from three hours prior to yours said:
> It was pretty simple really - all they had to do was not lie about Cloudflare endorsing them
If Kamala Harris used Cloudflare, not an issue. If Kamala Harris went on to very publicly falsely state on her website that Cloudflare supported her and the Democratic Party to the hilt .. then that's another thing and something that breaks the Terms of Service .. apparently that was what tripped The Daily Stormer .. claiming they had Cloudflare "in their corner".
> What if Kamala Harris used cloudflare in front of her website? Is cloudflare now supporting the Democratic party? What if Trump did? Same thing?
Hosting content isn't the same as endorsing every word of it. Newspapers print op-eds that run counter to what the editorial board believes. But providing a platform to someone is still a choice, yes.
> By your logic, it seems like cloudflare would have to review the content of every page on every site and only host it if they agree with it.
Nah, what is allowed vs how you enforce it are two different things. Believe it or not, the decision of how to enforce the rules is political too. Nothing about having a ToS that bans certain content necessarily requires pre-review of content any more than the rule that bans phishing sites or pirated movies does.
> You really don't think a neutral position would be to just not care what the content is, and just host everybody regardless who they are, what they believe, etc?
Absolutely it isn't. Declaring that you don't care about offensive hate speech and will not remove it when made aware of it is a choice. It's a deeply political choice. (Also, this is a bit of a straw man: surely you can't "not care what the content is" when something potentially illegal)
Thanks, you make some good points. You've won me over somewhat.
I agree that there's always at least some politics in choice/policy/enforcement because for any given value there are going to be people that oppose that value, but I don't think that means we should just embrace the political nature of it all and not try to be as "neutral" as possible. (To be clear I'm not suggesting that you are advocating for this, but I think it is the logical conclusion of accepting that everything is equally political). Some people's politics include free speech absolutism, and others include significant speech limitations, so a largely "we allow all legal speech" is a political stance when viewed that way, though it also strikes me as also the most "neutral" a platform can be, and I think that is mostly coincidental. There are plenty of political parties that disagree on many things for example, yet mostly agree that free speech and ability to express oneself is a good thing.
To be clear, I despise hate speech and I hate when people say offensive things. But trying to define hate speech is a recipe for sadness. The Israel/Palestine conflict has really shown that recently where some people consider it "hate speech" to criticize the government of either side. When it's a company or a newspaper or something, the cost of getting it wrong (either too tight or too loose) is much lower than when it's a platform that controls vast swathes of the public square.
Also, at what level does/should this matter? For example, should ISPs be pulling the plug if the customer has or shares content that they deem to be hate speech? Should power companies cut off electricity to those people?
I fully agree btw that Daily Stormer really messed up by claiming that CF supported them, but CF could have left their website in place and C&D'ed or sued for libel. I don't know what I would have done in their position though. There's a pretty good chance I would have done the same thing they did. It's hard to really know when you aren't in the soup.
Appreciate your comments. "We allow all legal free speech*" has the benefit of being very succinct. But when someone says, "hey one of your customers is encouraging violence and hostility against my family" and you keep it up anyway because it's legal, that is 100% as much a political choice as taking it down. "Well sorry, we're free speech absolutists" doesn't absolve you of the decision to host that site.
(* Though of course that's not really the policy anyway. You probably mean more like, "speech that, in our opinion, is likely to be ruled illegal" right? You're not waiting for someone to bring charges and a court to issue a final ruling. Making that determination isn't so easy. Whose laws are we following on a global internet anyway? Content moderation has no easy answers)
I found Cloudflare completely useless when trying to take down cloned scam websites using ".shop" domains. We had to go directly to the registrar to get them removed.
Moreover, the constant CAPTCHA prompts by Cloudflare are incredibly frustrating. This practice is a form of abuse and needs to be called out for being so.
>Moreover, the constant CAPTCHA prompts by Cloudflare are incredibly frustrating.
I despise Cloudflare with a burning passion. Currently they're blocking access to the danish parliament website (ft.dk) by putting up a CAPTCHA wall. Of course it's wrong of the admins to put essential danish infrastructure in the hands of a shitty american tech giant, but as you say this crap is everywhere. I refuse to interact with any CAPTCHA unless I absolutely have to.
Have you filed a complaint with the appropriate authorities? Citizens being blocked from government infrastructure shouldn't just be accepted as the way things are.
I think the article correctly places most of the blame on the DMCA. It's a bad law and always has been. I'm not sure how much customer service and legal support one can expect from a company that you are presumably using on a Free tier.
CloudFlare has promised to side with their customers, paying or not, for these kinds of things. Any lawyer could have easily dismissed this takedown request as invalid, and prevented the company from making a sloppy move that throws into question their core promises to their customers.
Now we all know that any given Cloudflare customer is vulnerable to a fraudulent takedown request, because Cloudflare doesn't do their due diligence. That's entirely on CloudFlare.
Cloudflare loses DMCA safe harbor protections if they do not follow the law and disable content after receiving a notification with all the required elements. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the DMCA doesn't say anything about verifying the merits of the takedown. (Setting aside the practicality of having an expert on copyright law review each notice even for customers who aren't paying anything)
In the case, if they had ignored the notification and CloudStrike sued anyway they could be stuck as a defendant on that lawsuit.
Plenty of providers happily ignore DMCA takedowns when they think their legal risk is low and when the customer is important-- they lose the safe harbor, sure, but only for that specific instance, which if it's transparently nonsense isn't much of a loss. This even often applies when the infringement is obviously real but the source of the report is someone that lacks the obvious resources to make it a real problem.
Even with the safe harbor they can still find themself a defendant, it may just be easier and faster to get themselves dismissed from the case.
This two tier system of handling is part of how the procedural flaws in the DMCA are able to persist as long as they have. If major institutions and brands were finding their content forced offline for 15 days at a time we'd see revisions quite quickly.
> I am generally a fan of Cloudflare and I think they are good players and good people
Companies generally don't have immutable characteristics like "good" or "bad". They have lifecycles. Today's scrappy startup fighting for the people becomes tomorrow's hated big tech oligarch.
I agree to some extent, but if the user is on a free account it seems complicated. You are asking Cloudflare to review sites on a case-by-case basis, evaluate legal documents, and potentially open themselves to legal risk, all for a non-paying user they don't know.
The user might very well lie about their situation, but also their contact info, and can easily create many accounts to avoid genuine DMCA requests.
That's fair, although I don't think they need to review every site on every dmca request, but if the customer replies to the automated request, they should at least take a quick look at that instead of just ignoring it and sending another automated request.
I get that cloudflare, just like every big tech company nowadays, doesn't want to pay for customer service. They want to automate everything and let the code handle the issues. Unfortunately, that general approach is turning our lives into a dystopian hellscape.
In this case, it's a parody site so it's not that big of a deal, but in cases that I'm sure happen regularly that we never hear about, it can be people's livelihoods being destroyed. I think we should expect more from these companies.
It's definitely true though, that if they had to spend on this sort of thing for free accounts, they may just take away the free accounts. That would obviously not be in our interest. I also think that's a very reasonable deal.
I would personally be satisfied if they would make a policy explicit, that for free accounts they will not review the DMCA request, rather they will just forward it and take automated action. For paid accounts though, I expect more.
The biggest thing I think, is to just be transparent and explicit about what their policy and procedure will be and for which account. Having mystery behind it is what bothers me the most and gives me pause when I think about hosting my assets with them.
> I would personally be satisfied if they would make a policy explicit, that for free accounts they will not review the DMCA request, rather they will just forward it and take automated action. For paid accounts though, I expect more.
That's fair. I wish EVERY service was clear about this tbh.
Isn't that Cloudflare's fault though? If you choose to offer a free account, you're aware of this risk. If you weren't, stop offering them and grandfather them.
It's a little more complex than that. Being say the only good company within a system that, aside not encouraging being good, usually awards with more profit who is not, can make the difference between life and death. I'm not a fan of the corporate world but sometimes they're forced to behave in such a way because there's no strong enough regulation to discourage everyone from doing so to gain an advantage.
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is a publically traded company. They have to maximize profit for their shareholders. But a company does not have to be public. It can be owned by one person (having all shares), family owned, or owned by people with similar values. I'm not saying this is always the easiest route, but it's certainly the way for any entrepenour who doesn't want to sell his morals.
Clownflare did drop Kiwi Farms. I don't particularly care for Kiwi Farms, but I don't think characterising them as a neo-nazi community is accurate. Throwing that label at any disagreeable person or community is counterproductive and devalues the term.
I do wonder if one could learn enough of the law to cheaply defend themselves against bogus DMCA notices. You see this sort of things all the time in emulation where the product itself is technically legal, but the people hosting the project have to shut down anyway because they know the legal costs of mounting a defense would bankrupt them.
It would be nice to turn the tables and say to N 'ok, we can do this all day, enjoy burning a mountain of cash with your legal team'
I had a post on Reddit taken down a while ago. It was entirely my content and did not even include any quotes. I looked into responding, but it would have included far more information than could be gleaned from my Reddit bio and I suspected it was a sort of phishing scheme to get that information. (I did not respond, it was not an important post.)
It goes beyond just doxing yourself; to legally respond to a DMCA notice, AFAIK you also have to consent to the jurisdiction of the USA courts. Which might be acceptable to a resident of the USA, since they're already under the jurisdiction of USA courts, but it can be problematic to residents of the rest of the world.
"Contents of counter notification [...] The subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification [...]"
As the other comment says, you have to basically dox yourself to respond in the legal sense, and of course there's expenses even to just doing everything yourself.
The law inherently favors corporations because every Tom Dick and Harry in the US of A doesn't have a lawyer, let alone an entire legal department. Yeah they might be wrong but they have basically infinite resources to drag out the process of you proving that until you call it quits for your own sanity, or simply run out of money to fight back.
Like the author of the post says, most of America's legal system is set up pretty explicitly to serve corporations.
Almost any court of sufficient level has filing fees for every legal motion that may be required in your case. Also, many courts require you to be physically present to argue your case, which depending where your case is actually being heard, could cost jack shit, or could cost a fortune. Not to mention the loss of income if you work a typical job, since you'll be taking time off, hopefully paid, to go to court. And of course hours and hours of research and uncompensated labor just to do all the paperwork involved.
Yeah, I'm mainly thinking of defending open source projects in retirement. The thought of being a nuisance to John Deer, Nintendo, Sony, etc tickles me a bit.
In this case, it sounds like CrowdStrike could have gotten CloudFlare to take down the website whether the DMCA notice was valid or not, without having to go through a legal process, since CloudFlare wasn't exactly helping.
If ClownStrike had not made the news, maybe CrowdStrike would continue to try the same DMCA trick with Hetzner.
It doesn't matter. Your hosting provider either doesn't care about the DMCA at all because it's run by some ideological free speech warrior (e.g. njalla; these hosts cost 5-10x more so you aren't using one) or it cares about taking things down and doesn't care about putting things back up (these are the ones people actually use e.g. Hetzner, Cloudflare).
It doesn't take much to send your service provider a DMCA counter notice [1].
> (3) Contents of counter notification.—To be effective under this subsection, a counter notification must be a written communication provided to the service provider’s designated agent that includes substantially the following:
> (A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
> (B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
> (C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
> (D) The subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
However, if your service provider wants to be under the DMCA safe harbor, they must keep your content down for at least 10 days and no more than 14 days after they receive the counter notice (unless they receive a further notice from the originator of the DMCA that they have filed a case regarding the alleged infringement --- in that case the content will remain down until the case is resolved).
In a lot of cases, having the content down for 10-14 days is kind of too long. Also, you may not want to provide your identity information to the originator of the complaint or your provider. You may also not be willing to state your good faith belief under penalty of perjury.
If the originator is willing to take their complaint to court, that's going to be an adventure --- but if they just send out mass DMCA complaints and don't follow up, you might be fine. If you actually want to take them to court over their complaints, even though they don't want to, that's an adventure too.
You may also try to convince your provider that the originators complaints aren't structurally valid DMCA complaints if they aren't, although that requires a sympathetic provider. I've only read summaries, but this case is a potential example of an invalid complaint, as the summary says it's a DMCA complaint about trademark infringement; the DMCA doesn't cover trademark, so the complaint is not structurally valid --- the provider has no duty to process it, and receives no safe harbor from doing so. They may or may not have a duty to take action on trademark complaints, but it doesn't arise from the DMCA.
I mean, I get it, but it's very hard to participate in the courts and pre-court process unless you're identifiable and contactable. So if you don't want to be identifiable, the easiest option is to let the takedown go through and just post it somewhere else.
That's a problem for the claimant to solve. For any other dispute they would have to file against john doe and get the court to find out the identity of the accused if the case isn't completely bogus. There is no reason why copyright disputes should be able you short-circuit that sanity check.
Every court officer who signs off on a bogus DMCA notice is violating their oath and is subject to disciplinary action. They are also committing barratry which appears to be a civil tort in some states.
They way this story usually goes: hosts are legally required to respond to dmca takedown requests as quickly as possible, please spare me the outrage.
In this case: cloudflare claims they never received any counter-notices from the parody guy (he sent two), and sent a weak "we would've helped you" after he moved the site off their services and they started getting negative attention. They screwed up royally.
It's absurd that they're attempting to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to enforce their trademark, and from their reply they seem to have made the same move to 500 other websites without any recourse.
I hate that companies have seen how places react to DMCA takedown requests and have responded by trying to force everything into a DMCA takedown request. Using it to avoid the necessary steps for a circumvention bypass was bad enough, trademark is covered by a whole range of unrelated laws.
So I could just draw a picture, call it Iron Man, never publish it and then send DMCA requests to all people who do anything with Marvel's Iron Man telling them to stop because they violate my copyright to my Iron Man?
I own copyright to my Iron Man and I can't be blamed for being misunderstood, right?
Or maybe I could name my drawing Iron Men? Blame mistargetting the DMCA on overzealous AI bot?
You can. If you do that, you'd likely be sued by the owner of the real Iron Man trademark (well, they'd send C&D first and if you don't stop they'll sue). But it's not likely you'd suffer any prosecution from the regulators. Of course, people legitimately dealing with Iron Man IP would otherwise ignore you, since they know who the real owner is. You may cause trouble to some people that are fair-using some Iron Man IP, but no more than Marvel already causing them anyway (probably much less).
Whether that approach would succeed in taking anything down is unclear, but I find it hard to imagine the DMCA claim going to court unless you idiotically sued Marvel.
Marvel might have a case against you for copyright or trademark infringement, and pleading ignorance probably won't fly there.
Why do businesses insist on learning about the Streisand Effect the hard way?
I would never have known about this low-effort parody site, and even if I did learn about it is of poor enough quality that I would never have shared it.
But now I am 100% behind this site, and interested in spreading the word, since it apparently touches a nerve.
It's impossible to be ideologically pure with every single decision. We live in a messy world.
In this case, I think he could be forgiven for (a) wanting to use his existing skillset to get his site online quickly and reliably and/or (b) actually believing that Cloudflare—based on previous actions—would robustly defend his site.
You can get your site online just as quick without Buttflare. If anything, adding a reverse proxy is additional work you would otherwise not have to do.
It's possible to support things without being fully invested personally in the idea. Does every proponent of decentralization also live off-the-grid and make computers by mining silicon by hand?
That's not really the same thing though, is it? You have to specifically opt into hosting your website on Cloudflare instead of any alternative, while knowing that it's one of the options more against your ideals. It takes the same effort to host a website on Cloudflare as it takes to go with any of the alternatives, like Netlify, Github Pages and Codeberg Pages (even better!). And all those options are free, too!
Okay that's your opinion on which service is "Better" or "Morally Superior" or whatever, I wasn't aware of any common agreements on the moral hierarchy of cloud hosting services. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and they are pretty low on my list of companies I wish to work with
Following the unfortunate announcement of our screw-up that resulted in what some (unfairly) qualify as the outage of the century, rest assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep our customers happy and as uninformed as possible. Since we're very, very sowy, and since we said "we're sowy", we don't appreciate people making fun of us. Please stop ridiculing us, or say mean things about us. In fact: we'd appreciate you leave us alone, it's already a hard time for us. Dont talk about us, unless, of course to pay us a compliment.
Just another day: some megacorporation trying to use scary lawyer letters to take down a parody site, banking on some member of the public not having the legal knowledge to know they're full of shit.
Also, complete 100% bullshit on it being unintentional. I'd imagine some executive in their organization found that and had a right tizzy about it. It's exactly the sort of completely meaningless deck-chair rearranging that the C-suites LOVE to send urgent-marked emails about, speaking from both anecdote and personal experience.
Who is hosting it now? I’m inspired by this website, and hope maybe one day I can have a parody website made popular by the Streisand effect. But who should I use to host it? Who should I use as a registrar? I’m a Cloudflare customer, but it’s clear I cannot trust them in this endeavor.
Edit: I did some searching and it looks like it might be hetzner.com hosting it now?
Crowdstrike yet again attempts to use the legal system to avoid responsiblity for their actions (theres talk right now if they'll be held financially responsible for the damage caused), fix thier PR (the Delta v Crowdstrike), and demonstrate that they will bully people engaging in fair use parody (clownstrike).
Apparently the DMCA takedown notice was filed by some third party that specializes in this form of trolling. I wonder how big the market for this nonsense is.
Sometimes companies are so big the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Maybe the legal department is overeager but the PR team would never had let this happen, given the chance.
It does cost them, actually, but they will not be able to measure it. Though they didn't have much good will and trust to start with.
I'm more surprised by how CF is handling this. They seemed like the "good guys" (for the Big Tech anyway) so this is not how I would expect them to handle the situation.
idk, the DMCA has done an immense amount of damage to society because of what amounts to bullying from those with large legal departments. I usually err on the side of blaming incompetence, but a well-run legal department should know this is a bogus claim.
> Sometimes companies are so big the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing
So it's really amazing, then, that they somehow remain profitable and in business. It's interesting that their "largeness" only seems to create problems for their customers and never for themselves.
Meanwhile if you have a company that's too large to reasonably coordinate, then you shouldn't be allowed to exist, as you're effectively admitting you don't actually exercise any authority over the business.
Every time one of these cases comes up, everyone wants to blame "bad apples in the legal department", but newsflash, the legal department aren't a bunch of cowboys that just run wild and do whatever they want - they often require the approval of someone higher up in the company to commence action.
Stop this. Stop letting companies you like off the hook by compartmentalizing the things you don't like to "the guys in the legal department".
The thing about CloudFlare is, I'm fairly comfortable expecting one of their executives to appear out here in the next few hours to own and address this in a common sense way.
Edit: I set up the site on bifidusdigestivum.com after getting too irritated by adverts where they talked about their amazing bacteria "Bifidus Digesivum", which was just so ridiculous I found out as much as I could about it and wrote about it in as SEO-friendly a way as possible so anyone searching for it found my site. It's had something like 1.5m views since then, and still gets 400-500 visits a month. Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but it still gives me a chuckle every now and then when I remember it.