CLOUDFLARE AND ONLINE PIRACY: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF DIGITAL INTERMEDIARIES UNDER SCRUTINY
The Tokyo District Court ruled that Cloudflare, one of the world's leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers, is liable for the manner in which it provides its services, which facilitates copyright infringement. The dispute concerned the illegal distribution of popular manga titles with a global reach, including the ONE PIECE and Attack on Titan series. The lawsuit was filed by four leading Japanese publishers – Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan.
The case dealt with the operation of two large pirate websites that illegally made more than 4,000 manga titles available. The sites recorded over 300 million visits per month and used Cloudflare's CDN services, which enable fast and efficient content distribution while making it difficult to identify the original servers.
The court found that the company's liability did not lie in the CDN technology itself, but in the manner in which it provided its services. In particular, it criticised the absence of thorough customer verification procedures (Know Your Customer – KYC) and the inadequate response to repeated notifications of copyright infringement.
According to the court, providing easy access to services without thorough client identification gave pirate website operators a high degree of anonymity. This significantly complicated the normal legal steps taken by copyright holders to protect their works.
Based on these conclusions, the court ruled out the possibility of using the so-called safe harbour under Japan's Information Distribution Platform Safety Act. It concluded that the company was aware of the illegal nature of the activities that its services enabled and had the technical ability to terminate them. Cloudflare was therefore ordered to pay approximately 500 million yen.
The decision fits into the broader international debate on the liability of digital intermediaries. Similar issues are also addressed by European law – for example, the Digital Services Act and the Copyright Directive strengthen the obligations of platforms in the area of due diligence and cooperation and limit exemptions from liability in cases where the intermediary does not act passively or respond to obvious infringements of the law.
The company is also facing regulatory measures in Italy. The regulatory authority AGCOM recently imposed a fine of over EUR 14 million on the company for violating anti-piracy legislation (Law No. 93/2023). According to the authority, the company failed to comply with an order to block access to illegal content reported by the rights holder through the Piracy Shield system and did not take sufficient technological and organisational measures to prevent the further dissemination of such content.
This development confirms that even technology intermediaries can be held directly liable if they fail to respond to clear and timely requests to remove illegal content.
Source: previti.it
