An Italian Court has upheld an appeal from the popular website hosting company Cloudflare for site-blocking measures. As reported by TorrentFreak, Cloudflare must now follow through with the orders and block 3 well-known torrent websites through its public DNS resolver.
In 2022, numerous music companies including Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal targeted Cloudflare in a Milan court. In hearings, the music companies noted that Cloudflare was contributing to copyright infringement by providing access to these websites.
The court ultimately ruled on the side of the music companies and an interim injunction was issued requiring Cloudflare to block the following torrent sites:
- kickasstorrents.to
- limetorrents.pro
- ilcorsaronero.pro
This did not stop Cloudflare, however, as they immediately filed an appeal to get the ruling overturned. Cloudflare argued in their first appeal that a blocking order would affect users outside of Italian jurisdiction.
Even though the blockades are meant for Italian residents, they would ultimately apply to everyone attempting to access these sites. They also noted that DNS blocking is an ineffective measure that can be bypassed with the use of a VPN.
Unfortunately, the court thought differently and dismissed Cloudflare’s appeal making it the first time Cloudlfare has been ordered to block sites via its DNS resolver.
The fight continued for Cloudflare with another appeal to the Court of Milan requesting clarification of the site blocking rules. In their latest appeal, the DNS Company claimed that blocking measures interrupt DNS service and may be difficult to achieve.
The court shut down this rebuttal, noting that Cloudflare already blocks various content on its DNS Servers including DNS resolver for families. The court noted:
The evidence on record seems to suggest that the appellant itself sets up general preventive verification systems on the content of the sites it serves, with regard to the monitoring of content unsuitable for minors or for crimes related to pedophilia…
It seems that Cloudflare vows to continue fighting this ruling and may file a lawsuit to challenge site blocking in the future.
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