CloudFlare want to block in Russia for working with "pirates"

Photo: JOURNAL / Vladimir Suvorov

In the Moscow City Court filed several lawsuits against the US service CloudFlare . The plaintiffs are the Russian companies Volga, Megogo and NTV Plus. The reason for the claim is the cooperation of the service with pirated resources that illegally distribute copyrighted content, writes Izvestia. According to expert estimates, about a third of blocked IP addresses in Russia belong to CloudFlare.

“There is a website kinogo.co that pirates us. And not only us, it is one of the most malicious pirates. CloudFlare performs the functions of an information mediator, providing the possibility of placing and transmitting [pirated content] on the Internet. Formally, a lawsuit was filed to protect several titles with their listing. The claim requirement is to stop the creation of technical conditions ensuring the placement, distribution and other use of intellectual property, ”says the head of Megogo Victor Chekanov.

This opinion is expressed by the executive director of Volga, Anastasia Sergeeva. According to her, the company "Volga" has claims to several sites that illegally post content protected by copyright. These are sites such as dream-film.net, kinokrik.net, o-nline.ws, kinokong.net, kinokrad.net, kinoprosmotr.net. And they all use the CloudFlare service.
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“Unfortunately, the situation is such that filing lawsuits with providers is a more effective mechanism in this situation. Often there is no information about a specific site administrator and it is impossible to find it. For obvious reasons, the owners of such sites strive to preserve anonymity by all means, ”says Sergeeva. She also noted that hosting providers have the technical ability to block the offender's page.

It is worth noting that CloudFlare issues dynamic IP to its clients. For this reason, in the writ of execution sent to Roskomnadzor, IP addresses are not specified. Deciding what to block - the IP of pirated sites or the entire CloudFlare should Roskomnadzor itself.

As for lawyers, various experts evaluate the situation differently.

“Most likely, representatives of CloudFlare will not go to court and the verdict will not be in their favor. They most likely will not execute the verdict. It is likely that Russia will block CloudFlare entirely. This will lead to a surge in popularity of anonymizers. When unpopular resources are blocked, users will look for new ones, but if popular ones are not available, people will master the means of bypassing locks. And what will be blocking further in order to prevent access to blocked sites? ”, Says independent lawyer Anton Bogatov.

But the head of the legal department of the Coordination Center of the national domain of the Internet network, Sergey Kopylov, argues that Roskomnadzor should enter into the register exclusively IP violator sites. "The law does not provide for the responsibility of the channel or hosting provider, especially foreign ones, for not responding to complaints from the copyright holder," Kopylov commented on the situation.