The internet security service CloudFlare is often used by many websites across the world to keep server loads down, some of them just also happen to be pirate hubs that need their web hosts to be masked and anonymous to confuse the government or piracy hunters from hunting them down and shutting their sites down.
It was reported last year that academic publishing company, Elsevier had filed a complaint with three separate known pirated websites, Libgen, Bookfi & Sci-Hub. The academic organization tried to obtain information from these sites by going through a “trusted notifier” (like MPAA) that reports large-scale pirate websites registered to a particular domain. Unfortunately, they failed to succeed because CloudFlare responded that it could not share information fo inactive sites on the network. So Elsevier did what they had to do, they took it to the courts and requested a discovery subpoena to identify these site operators. The New York court system found them in favor and they are currently ordering CloudFlare to turn over all detailed information to identify Libgen, Bookfi & Sci-Hub operators since there is enough evidence to accuse them of engaging in copyright-infringing activities.
Now I know that you may be asking what can CloudFlare do since these sites are no longer operating on their servers, which means that things like old information, IP addresses and identification won’t be stored. And while these site operators are ordered to take down their domain names, there is a factor that isn’t quite taken into consideration – these sites may be located in other countries outside of the US’s dominion, and more than likely they’ll continue to relocate their servers and ignore US court orders.
