[rsingel]

Cloudflare's lawyers should have told Crowd strike to kick rocks.

The DMCA's copyright provisions apply only to copyrighted content not trademarks.

Cloudflare could have told these clowns to go kick rocks without incurring any liability and could have threatened them with filing fake DMCA claims.

[Terretta]

> Cloudflare's lawyers should have told Crowd strike to kick rocks.

Not all ISPs use provisions in the DMCA that let them put the burden back on the claimant. A few do.

In general, if ISPs or CDNs have a free plan, they can't, as bad actors leverage these free plans in bulk.

But ISPs or CDNs that charge actual money to known customers will generally not take down until all legal avenues to keep their client online are exhausted or someone upstream from them blinks which threatens the rest of their customers.

It's not a question of getting what you pay for so much as being sure that everyone using the same provider is paying, and having a discussion with the provider before it happens instead of during. You also need all links to play it this way, or you have to host in a different jurisdiction, which may not be possible for some data/content.

There are ISPs, CDNs, DNS registrars, data center facilities, backbone providers, who don't take down before asking questions, so if you need to be in the USA, find those.

// I have been both a provider refusing to take a client down for nonsense, and a client of those upstream who refused to take us down when our clients were under threat. And yes, when this would happen we spent money rather than cave if the mega corp insisted to go to court, yes the mega corps lost (typically instantly), and yes we donated to EFF.

[Terretta]

McSherry told Ars that major service providers like Cloudflare can become "chokepoints," where lawful speech gets taken down because, regardless of intent, "they can't be precise in what they do" once their platform gets too big and reports get too numerous. She agreed with Senk that a few large companies controlling vast amounts of content online can be problematic.

"It is true that there are a relatively small number of companies that have outsized influence over what is available online," McSherry said. "And that can be really difficult or create a real problem because sometimes they don't have any choice but to sort of overcensor."

"In this case, "there was just big companies using big processes and not being careful," McSherry said. "And that is not acceptable."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/parody-site-clow...

[bhelkey]

> Cloudflare could have told these clowns to go kick rocks without incurring any liability

If Cloudflair didn't remove the content and the content was infringing they could lose their safe harbor protections [1].

In this case the website is obviously parody. This highlights the problems with DMCA. Fraudulent DMCA requests incur cost but are almost never penalized.

[1] https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown

[poizan42]

Not if the DMCA takedown notice wasn't valid in the first place.

(By valid I mean it correctly follows the requirements in the DMCA, one of them being that it must be for copyright. It does not apply to other kinds of IP, nor does it apply to other violations of the DMCA such as the anti-circumvention provision cough youtube-dl cough)

[rsingel]

This is correct and exactly why Cloudflare should have thrown this in the green compost bin the moment it showed up, and written back to say if you send us this kind of trash again, we will sue you.