Cloudflare being sued for faciliting piracy

[GethN7]

True enough, but I would see Cloudflare is being more like a utility than anything else.  That would be like prosecuting Verizon for providing service to a phone scammer.

I would support this notion. Utility and media companies have been doing everything they can to exploit the lack of law around the internet, and in the USA hiding behind USA law that absolves them while at the same time USA government bodies do nothing in the name of the 1st Amendment and it being entirely too difficult for the government to enforce the law, so such a reading of the law would also permit class action lawsuits against Google and Facebook Meta and Twitter for advertisements and scams on their platforms.

It'd need only succeed once and you'd see a shift to tighter controls to keep very expensive legal bills away.

I disagree because it's a slippery legal slope.

By that logic, if gas was sold to a car that did a hit and run later, you could sue the gas provider. Telephones are used by so many people, and any blanket restriction to punish those who unlawfully use telephones would also hurt the law-abiding.

Cloudflare just keeps a site up, that's all. They provide a neutral service to all sorts of sites that are legal and illegal equally. Punishing them for keeping a site up that allows pirated content is just screwing over the innocent as well as the guilty. Besides, you can punish the owner of the website and just punish who deserves to be punished for actually committing a crime.

Cloudflare is selling an umbrella to websites in the rain. Just because some of the sites under that umbrella are doing illegal things is in no way proof Cloudflare approves of the site. If applied to real life, the umbrella seller could be sued for allowing a criminal to commit a crime in the rain by that logic. The burglar who buys a flashlight to house invade could have the maker of the flashlight be sued by the homeowner despite the flashlight maker having no way of knowing what all their customers were going to do with said flashlights.

If this succeeds, it will harm the innocent along with the guilty, and the former should not have to unduly suffer from the actions of the latter any more than absolutely necessary.