Cloudflare is being sued in California court by two wedding-dress makers – yep, wedding-dress makers – for copyright infringement. According to Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, Cloudflare has “failed to terminate sites” that the plaintiffs claim are selling counterfeit dresses.
This seems crazy on many levels. I’ll list a few …
- Accusing a website of copyright infringement does not automatically make that site guilty. I know this for a fact, having been falsely accused of criminal copyright infringement myself.
- CF can’t “terminate sites” because it does not host sites. At most, CF could decline to provide their services, but the sites would still be live and would almost certainly just switch to a different DNS provider and reverse proxy.
- The concept that CF is somehow required to serve – for free – as the copyright enforcer for random dressmakers seems beyond absurd. That’s what copyright lawyers are for – but they don’t work for free.
- CF doesn’t ignore Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, it passes the notice on to the relevant customer. Again, CF *can’t* take down the allegedly infringing content, CF doesn’t host the content.
So CF is sure to be vindicated in this lawsuit, right? Nope. Time will tell, but a key phrase is “California court”. California courts issue a lot of rulings that defy all logic.
Update 2021-11-04: Cloudflare wins! Three years after the lawsuit was filed (the wheels of justice grind slowly), Judge Vince Chhabria of the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted a summary judgment in Cloudflare’s favor. Even in California courts, logic and justice can occasionally prevail.
