Cloudflare has become the first internet intermediary beyond local residential ISPs, to block access to pirate sites in the UK. Users attempting to access certain pirate sites are greeted with 'Error 451 - Unavailable for Legal Reasons'. In theory, ISP blocking should prevent UK users from even seeing this notice, but a combination of Cloudflare's blocking mechanism and choices made by some VPN users results in a piracy dead end.
Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market and as a result, blocking injunctions previously obtained at the High Court often list these companies as respondents.
These so-called “no fault’ injunctions stopped being adversarial a long time ago; ISPs indicate in advance they won’t contest a blocking order against various pirate sites, and typically that’s good enough for the Court to issue an order with which they subsequently comply.
For more than 15 years, this has led to blocking being carried out as close to users as possible, with ISPs’ individual blocking measures doing the heavy lifting. A new wave of blocking targeting around 200 pirate site domains came into force yesterday but with the unexpected involvement of a significant new player.
Cloudflare Blocks Pirate Sites “For Legal Reasons”
If piracy is rampant, in the UK pirate site blocking must qualify as rampant too. In the latest wave of blocking that seems to have come into force yesterday, close to 200 pirate domains requested by the Motion Picture Association were added to one of the longest pirate site blocking lists in the world.
The big change is the unexpected involvement of Cloudflare, which for some users attempting to access the domains added yesterday, displays the following notice:
As stated in the notice, Error 451 is returned when a domain is blocked for legal reasons, in this case reasons specific to the UK.
In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare’s pass-through security and CDN services within the United Kingdom.
Background: Cloudflare’s Blocking Policy
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