CloudFlare want to block in Russia for cooperation with the "pirates"

Photo: Izvestia / Vladimir Suvorov

Several lawsuits have been filed at the Moscow City Court against the American CloudFlare service . The plaintiffs are Volga, Megogo, and NTV Plus. The reason for the lawsuit is the cooperation of the service with pirated resources that illegally distribute copyrighted content, Izvestia writes . According to experts, about a third of the blocked IP addresses in Russia belong to CloudFlare.

“There is a kinogo.co website that pirates us. And not only us, this is one of the most malicious pirates. CloudFlare acts as an information intermediary, providing the ability to host and transmit [pirated content] on the Internet. Formally, a lawsuit has been filed to protect several titles with their listing. The claim is to stop creating technical conditions that ensure the placement, distribution and other use of intellectual property, ”says Viktor Chekanov, head of Megogo.

A similar opinion is expressed by the executive director of Volga Anastasia Sergeeva. According to her, the Volga company has claims to several sites that illegally host copyrighted content. 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.

“Unfortunately, the situation has developed in such a way that filing lawsuits against providers is a more effective mechanism in such a situation. Often there is no information about a particular site administrator and it is impossible to find it. Owners of such sites, for obvious reasons, by all means strive to remain anonymous, ”says Sergeyeva. She also noted that hosting providers have the technical ability to block the intruder’s page.

It is worth noting that CloudFlare issues dynamic IPs to its customers. For this reason, in the writ of execution sent to Roskomnadzor, IP addresses are not indicated. Roskomnadzor itself must decide what to block - the IP of pirated sites or the entire CloudFlare.

As for lawyers, various experts assess the situation differently.

“Most likely, CloudFlare representatives will not go to court and the verdict will not be in their favor. Most likely, they will not execute the verdict. It is likely that in Russia they will block CloudFlare entirely. This will lead to a surge in the popularity of anonymizers. When blocking less popular resources, users will look for new ones, but if popular ones are unavailable, people will learn how to bypass locks. And what will be blocked further 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 Internet domain domain Sergey Kopylov claims that Roskomnadzor should only include IP offending sites in the registry. “The law does not provide for liability of a channel or hosting provider, especially a foreign one, for not responding to complaints from the copyright holder,” Kopylov commented on the situation.