Cloudflare has become the first international hosting provider to block access to pirate sites in the UK following a court order, showing users error 451.
G. Ostrov
Cloudflare has become the first international hosting provider to block access to pirate sites in the UK. Users attempting to access certain resources see the message: "Error 451 — Unavailable for legal reasons."
Court Order and Its Implementation
In response to a court injunction, Cloudflare took steps to restrict access to sites through security services and CDN in the UK. The new wave of blocking targeted around 200 pirate site domains, with the list prepared by the Motion Picture Association.
Usually, local internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet block pirate resources themselves, covering a large portion of the UK's home internet market. However, Cloudflare has now joined the blocking process.
Cloudflare's Position
Since the company cannot remove content that it does not host on its servers, it regularly rejects attempts to obtain court injunctions for blocking. Cloudflare notes that it may take steps to comply with existing orders if "principles regarding proportionality, due process, and transparency" are observed.
Technical Implementation
Cloudflare uses geo-blocking in the UK, as confirmed by some VPN users. The court notification was received as early as February 22, 2024. Previously, in December 2022, the court demanded blocking of domains including 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix, and onionplay.
Legal Context
In 2024, the UK officially introduced strict internet safety requirements. The new law requires tech giants to be responsible for materials uploaded to their platforms and introduces large fines for non-compliance.
The law covers social media, search engines, messaging, gaming, and dating applications, as well as pornographic sites and file-sharing services.
Industry Significance
This precedent may change the approach to combating online piracy, as for the first time a major international CDN service provider is actively participating in content blocking based on court decisions from individual countries.
Additional information about Cloudflare's policies can be found on the company's official website.
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