parhamn 3 days ago | next |

The conversation seems centered on Cloudflare and the broader piracy issue. The more interesting thing to me is that sports are in desperate need of their spotify/netflix moment. My current best guess is that this isn't possible because of existing longer term contracts they've had in place.

Currently streameast and such have the best UI for watching sports games and it's not even close. Casual/nascent fans don't want to pay $100 a month for announcer-less access to sideline camera feeds. I don't want to look up where every game is streaming that week. I don't want a membership to peacock or whatever to see this one game I'm sorta interested in. No I don't have cable anymore either. I don't care to understand how "blackouts" work. It goes on an on.

It seems maliciously bad. And their numbers are showing it. From Gen Z's low adoption rates, to lower rates of onboarding new fans and broadly reduced viewership in some sports like the NBA.

I don't know a single person who pirates music these days.

badlibrarian 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...

SpicyLemonZest 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm not sure we should expect other leagues to follow suit. Unlike other leagues, the NFL is intentionally trying to make it difficult to watch their games to protect ticket sales. It probably doesn't make sense as a strategy for less popular sports that need to get people interested in the first place.

dylan604 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

If you want to protect ticket sales, don't make the price of tickets astronomically high. Then, once at the stadium, make parking cheaper than $90. Make concessions affordable too. At that point, you'll have buts in seats at every game. Owner greed is why ticket sales even need this so called "protection"

donmcronald 3 days ago | root | parent |

That’s a feature. It’s like Broadcom increasing the price of VMWare. They only want rich customers.

brewdad 2 days ago | root | parent |

At some point you price out an entire generation and find they've moved on to something else like e-sports.

badlibrarian 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Not sure I follow. The local NFL team's game is on free TV, over the air. People pay or resort to piracy to watch the better game that's four states away. You have to subscribe to see one-off games in England, or subscribe to Netflix to watch the games on Christmas Day.

diggan 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model.

That sounds very over the top, but I don't know enough about the US, NFL or TV to dispute that.

For La Liga (or F1/MotoGP for that matter) you can at least get away with a ~30 EUR/month subscription to see the games, with various providers. Is there really not one network broadcasting/streaming all the games somewhere?

notatoad 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

>That sounds very over the top

because watching every single NFL game is over the top. people watch their team's games, and maybe whatever else is on if their team isn't playing. they don't watch every game ever. except for a few hardcore weirdos, and $2500 is a reasable price to pay if you're that into it.

streaming rights are a mess, and there's certainly room for it to be a lot more user-friendly. but watching every single game isn't a useful metric.

maroonblazer 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I'm not sure when the NFL started doing this but you can now watch highlights from seemingly every game on YT. These highlight reels are edited quite well, capturing the significant moments of each game.

I'm not much of a football fan, really only following my local team and one other. But now I watch the highlights of almost every other game on YT.

ddulaney 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Nope! The NFL has a long tradition of splitting off games into their own categories: most games are played on Sunday in the afternoon and are carried on the “big 4” networks in the US, then there are 1 or 2 games each on Sunday Night, Monday, and Thursday. To be clear: these are all regular season games, just at different timings.

The rights to each “day” of games then get sold off separately. So right now Thursday games are on Prime, Monday games are on ESPN+, and Sunday Night games are on Peacock. Generally the steaming services want to use the games as an onboarding tool, so they are not available anywhere else and you have to subscribe to their whole streaming service, not just the games.

There is a service called “NFL Sunday Ticket” but it only lets you watch the games that aren’t available to you in some other way (so if it’s on Prime it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket for anyone and if it’s on old-school antenna broadcast it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket if the broadcast is too close to you).

To watch all of the NFL games you’ll need:

- Prime

- ESPN+

- Peacock

- Cable/Antenna/Fubo/YouTube TV (for home-team Sunday games)

- NFL Sunday Ticket (for other Sunday games)

(Or you can just pirate them, which is cheap and easy.)

awad 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

FWIW Monday night games are available on standard ESPN and, sometimes, ABC and Sunday night games are on NBC. So you don't strictly speaking need Peacock or ESPN+

brewdad 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

But this Christmas Day you will also need Netflix if you want to watch the Texans game with Beyonce half time show. Not usre about the other Christmas Day game.

fourfour3 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This situation is a real mess when you being in international rights too - eg F1TV largely doesn’t operate in F1’s biggest markets as the rights to live broadcast are still owned by existing cable/satellite networks.

dylan604 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

International sports are similar. The EPL is spread across Peacock, NBC, USA/Telemundo. There are days I have to resort to watching a Spanish broadcast of a match because whatever strained logic NBC has used on what games to make available where. Assuming this is in an attempt to drive viewers to dying cable channels??? It's extremely frustrating

diggan 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

> International sports are similar

I'm not so sure. I can easily get access to all La Liga matches for waay less than ~$2,500, and the same goes for most non-American sports I care to watch sometimes. I was even surprised how easy it was to get HBO Max to watch every single Olympic event this year, think it cost 15-20 EUR in total or something. For reference, this is for a Spanish resident, so YMMV.

dylan604 2 days ago | root | parent |

I said similar in that it is split across multiple places. You need a sub to Peacock. You need a cable sub to get USA. You need an antenna or cable to get NBC. While these don't approach the same $2500, there is no single place to go to watch the matches.

brewdad 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Please more leagues just give me a reasonably priced service to get all the games. In the US, the full F1 season is $90. The full MLB season can be had for about $100 if you buy it on sale. I got last season for $40 by waiting until June. I don't generally follow such a long season until about then anyway. College football is about all I'm missing. That still requires a cable/streaming sub. I can wait until March and do a one month sub to get my college basketball fix. I pay for Peacock every July for Le Tour.

NBA is dead to me. NHL is fine but not worth paying for. Not a big NFL fan and I'd buy MLS if it were unbundled from AppleTV+. I'm not paying for both.

Just one man's opinion.

aegypti 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I think it’s just the sheer size and appetite of top dogs like the premier league.

La Liga and Bundesliga are both on ESPN+ in a single sub, all Serie A and Champions League matches are on Paramount+, all MLS matches are on Apple+, etc.

holden_nelson 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This stat is disingenuous.

1. $2500 is one year of cable + streaming services required to watch every football game. If you don’t have cable it’s $1700.

2. $1700 is the cost to maintain all of those services year round; the regular season + playoffs is 5 months long

It’s probably more like $800, which is still a lot, especially when they’re already monetizing the product by shoving ads down our throats every 30 seconds (though it’s a different “they”)

fmajid 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Sports teams and orgs like FIFA are ruthlessly effective at extracting every last cent of value from sports broadcasting rights, to the point it's not profitable for broadcasters/streamers other than ESPN (and even the latter's profitability, once the mainstay of Disney profits, is collapsing). It's a mug's game to play, yet suckers are seemingly born every day, as with Netflix paying

sureIy 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Why would they? Sports fans need to watch their teams, they will pay whatever they can afford to do so. This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music (which you can do for free on the radio). And particularly, with those services you don't need to listen/watch it live.

Why would they lower their profits? Even services like YouTube TV eventually catch up in price with regular cable.

thiht 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

> This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music

It’s kinda the same though. If I want to watch Interstellar, I won’t settle for Gravity because it’s what Netflix has. If I want to watch Interstellar and it’s not on Netflix or Prime Video, I’m going to pirate it.

acuozzo 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> Why would they lower their profits?

Because doing so is likely to make the total profits $0 in the future as it makes each generation less interested than their parents were.

downrightmike 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I really don't care about watching millionaires play for billionaires, or indentured servitude college students making billions for the NCAA. College sports are a whole other racket that has destroyed our schools

1659447091 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

> or indentured servitude college students making billions for the NCAA

That's no longer the case. NIL is paying out hundreds of thousands to millions for 18-21 year olds in College Football[0] (don't know how much other sports get, but they get paid too) unless they are in a state that bans it (not sure if there are still hold outs) or the military academies, but they are a different breed entirely. It's basically minor league pro football now.

[0] https://collegefootballnetwork.com/top-10-nil-deals-in-2024/

gruez 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

>I really don't care about watching millionaires play for billionaires

I take it that you also don't watch any scripted TV shows or movies either? "millionaire (actors) acting for billionaires (producers/production companies)" is a reasonably accurate description of how such programming are produced as well.

stubish 2 days ago | root | parent |

Are you advocating that these sports follow professional wrestling, switching from being sporting events to scripted entertainment? Or that this has already happened?

gruez 2 days ago | root | parent |

No, the point is that if you object to professional sports on the basis that it's "watching millionaires play for billionaires", then to be consistent you should also object to scripted television/movies, which can have the same objection levied against it. That's not to say you can't prefer sports over scripted television/movies, just that you can't use that excuse to hate on former and but still claim to enjoy the latter.

donmcronald 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

For the NHL, I would pay more for the pirate streaming setup I have than I would for SportsNet in Canada. The only thing they have to do to get money from me is offer a product that isn’t absolute trash.

shlomo_z 3 days ago | prev | next |

While I do not support piracy, I am worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common.

athrowaway3z 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

While I do support piracy. Services like Cloudflare already locked up most of the free internet you're imagining.

IgorPartola 3 days ago | root | parent |

I see this and I don’t quite understand how. You don’t have to use their services. You can host your own whenever and wherever you’d like. The amount of providers now is greater than ever and even home internet connections are getting fast enough for some reasonable hosting.

diggan 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

There are entire countries that you effectively block out by using Cloudflare on your websites, the very least is the countries embargoed by the US who Cloudflare aren't legally allowed to serve.

Besides that, Cloudflare is pretty aggressive with their captchas/blocks, and there been times where I, a resident of Spain, been blocked out because it's impossible to pass their captcha. I either have to give up and find some alternative service doing the same but without Cloudflare, or I try again another day and suddenly it works.

IgorPartola 3 days ago | root | parent |

Even in the US I have had the same problem. I do what you do: just use another website that does the same thing. Having CAPTCHA on a website is a pretty hostile pattern and shouldn’t be a thing but that seems like it’s not the same thing as CloudFlare has ruined the internet.

xethos 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It's not a complaint of how you (or I) can self-host and avoid Cloudflare, it's a complaint about how so many others use do Cloudflare. Especially what happens if Cloudflare doesn't like the way your IP address or browser look, or doubt your humanity.

dylan604 3 days ago | root | parent |

This was my response as well. The number of people hosting websites that large numbers of people visit is much smaller than people of this forum would like to admit. The vast majority of web users don't visit Joe's self-hosted blog, they view Joe's content on the various social platforms. It doesn't make sense for Joe to host his own site.

IgorPartola 3 days ago | root | parent |

Ok so if it doesn’t make sense for Joe to host his website because it’s just not interesting enough for people to visit then how is others using different CDNs than CloudFlare going to solve that?

xethos 3 days ago | root | parent |

We (or I, at least) aren't asking Joe Blogman to host his own site (though if he does, I'll cheer them on just the same). We're asking other, bigger sites, the ones that large groups of people visit, to avoid Cloudflare. These tend to be the "infrastructure" websites; the ones that, if you can't access them, you have a harder time that day because you have an actual task you have to do - and the company behind the website that Cloudflare is blocking you from, has reduced other avenues of completing the task because "customers can use the website".

It is in this way that Cloudflare is bad. It's bad for consumers being blocked because Cloudflare doesn't like their browser, IP, or local weather (because who the hell knows exactly why they're being blocked), and it's bad for businesses too: both competing CDNs that can't compete with CF's scale, and businesses that rely on CF but will be hit with a monopoly-sized price increase once Cloudflare's competition is extinct.

remram 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

As a host, you don't have to use their services for your site. As a visitor, you really don't have a choice as most sites you visit use CloudFlare.

IgorPartola 3 days ago | root | parent |

How has this impacted you as a user and what did you do when it did?

remram 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

It has affected me from specific ISPs, e.g. running a desktop on a cloud server or browsing from hotel wifi etc. What I had to do is stop or switch to mobile data, there's not really any workaround or recourse when you hit the infinite CAPTCHA loop.

finnthehuman 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It’s been a foregone conclusion for 10+ years. Piracy is a holdout, not the beginning. Very few people will go to the ends of technical and legal means to stay online.

doctorpangloss 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?

sureglymop 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

No law is being broken by downloading/consuming what's commonly referred to as "pirated content" here in Switzerland. Downloading music, TV shows, movies and ebooks is legal for private use.

Companies which import storage media (e.g. DVDs) pay levies which are meant to be paid out to the rights holders. These rights can be asserted through collecting societies, e.g. Suissimage for filmmakers.

https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar...

Interestingly the article right after that one is about the "decoding of computer programs" and says: Any person who has the right to use a computer program may obtain, either personally or through a third party, necessary information on the interfaces by decoding the program code using independently developed programs.

JellyBeanThief 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

At a 10 year length of copyright.

badlibrarian 3 days ago | root | parent |

Cool. Now work through the implications for open source licenses.

jolmg 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.

badlibrarian 3 days ago | root | parent |

If that were the case, we wouldn't need GPL, we would just call it public domain. So why didn't we do that?

jolmg 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses).

Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit?

Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see:

  $ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100'
      242 MIT
      277 LGPL
      348 GPL
      381 BSD
However, looking at https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on..., I see:

  |  1 | MIT          | 44.69% |
  |  2 | Other        | 15.68% |
  |  3 | GPLv2        | 12.96% |
  |  4 | Apache       | 11.19% |
  |  5 | GPLv3        |  8.88% |
  |  6 | BSD 3-clause |  4.53% |
  |  7 | Unlicense    |  1.87% |
  |  8 | BSD 2-clause |  1.70% |
  |  9 | LGPLv3       |  1.30% |
  | 10 | AGPLv3       |  1.05% |

badlibrarian 2 days ago | root | parent |

The broader point being that every one of those licenses is just that -- a license. The terms of the license apply because the material is copyrighted.

And it's one place where you can directly specify your intent. In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.

Varying durations for different types of media should be discussed as part of copyright reform. But simple statements like "10 years" reveal that people haven't thought things through.

wat10000 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

Or maybe they have thought things through and they just don’t agree with your conclusion.

For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.

1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.

jolmg 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.

Look, I'm no lawyer, but my broader point is that something like that might not make much if any difference to most. It doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the MIT license and public domain. The MIT just requires attribution and propagation of the license text.

If you add up the MIT licensed projects with others that have similar licenses, you might get to a 51%, at least according to the GitHub stats. I would think most of these people just picked a license by what other people picked. They don't really, really care to put the particular restrictions they did.

I'm not saying that 10 years is a good number, or that licenses are bad. I'm just saying that your pick of FOSS might be a poor example to argue about the need for long copyright terms.

The only ones among the FOSS community that likely care to have long copyright terms are those that pick GPL-type licenses, which have more substantial restrictions to ensure the freedoms of end-users.

badlibrarian 2 days ago | root | parent |

Linux, Blender, and WordPress immediately spring to mind as software that would be in a very different place if their codebases reverted to public domain at the 10th year of their existence.

jolmg 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

In what particular way do you think they'd be different if they'd gone into the public domain at 10 years?

shiroiushi 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The Linux kernel has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Having all the code in it that's >= 10yo become public domain would only mean you'd be able to run an ancient kernel on old hardware without worrying about the GPL license terms.

bluGill 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

How many are still running kermels from 10 years ago. even for mainline stuff with insignificant changes such that it is out of copyright (an interesting legal question itself), there is enough that is significant in new kernels

badlibrarian 2 days ago | root | parent |

It's not about running a 10 year old Kernel, it's about a trillion dollar corporation owning a source snapshot, throwing 5,000 engineers at it, and not contributing anything back.

It also effectively turns GPL3 to GPL2 on a rolling 10 year basis.

People freaked about Tivo 20 years ago. Now imagine what kind of chaos Nvidia and Oracle could cause starting from even Ubuntu 14 or a 3.18 Kernel.

bluGill 2 days ago | root | parent |

The continued success of tye various bsd proves your fears are way over stated.

badlibrarian a day ago | root | parent |

I'm surprised at people falling back into the BSD, MIT and GPL banter from 15 years ago.

Stop promoting your faves, stop generalizing about the motivations behind your non-faves, and to paraphrase John Lennon: imagine no licensing.

Now think a little deeper how that would change the motivations of developers, massive corporations, and VCs. Especially those that have given little but lip service to the whole movement.

belorn 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There is a fairly major difference between a copyright of 100+ years, 10 years and 0 years. Right now we have 100+ years and thus we need GPL as a counter force.

If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.

A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.

At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.

teddyh 8 hours ago | root | parent | next |

In the very early history of computing, it was still belived that copyright did not apply to computer programs. What large companies, like IBM, did was to require all customers to first sign a contract where the customer was forbidden, among many other things, to spread or copy the software.

ndriscoll 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Because copyright doesn't expire on human timescales and it's legal to use cryptographic methods to prevent compatible hardware/software, so things wouldn't be on an even playing field.

If you had to submit source code to the copyright office to be granted a copyright, and it expired after ~10 years (at which point the source is published), and anticompetitive, anticonsumer hardware locking methods were illegal, you'd be looking at a reasonable trade again, and copyleft would be essentially redundant.

Dylan16807 a day ago | root | parent | prev |

To make 10 year copyright work with software, we would probably need to force companies to release the source code when the copyright expires. That way we keep an even playing field. Otherwise I think everything related to open source code would work out fine.

badlibrarian a day ago | root | parent |

That effectively gives the copyright holder an exclusive ten year head start on a derivative work, because only they have the source to build on. It has to be open from day one for anything to work. And if you blow away copyright and therefore GPL, obviously the incentives change dramatically.

Dylan16807 a day ago | root | parent |

I'm not really worried about someone building on GPL in secret while waiting for the license to expire. They're still stuck ten years behind mainline. It's a pretty even playing field, and I don't think any side gets blown out.

If proprietary code had to be released read-only a year or two in advance of becoming public domain you'd have basically the same effect, but I would not expect the effect to be very big.

adolph 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?

gruez 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.

nepthar 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses

wat10000 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

Physical goods aren’t the right analogy. Cloudflare provides services, not goods, which means Cloudflare is actively involved in the illegal activity.

There’s ample precedent for requiring companies to stop serving known criminals, and for requiring them to do some basic checks to try to avoid doing it in the first place. Just look at all the trouble that state-legal-but-federally-illegal marijuana retailers have with the financial system.

There are services where this is not expected. The post office delivers the mail regardless. But I don’t see why Cloudflare would be one of those universal services.

This seems like a typical tech company thing where they act like they have an inherent right to scale. If they actually checked what their services were being used for then they could easily spot this stuff and shut it down, but that costs money and takes time.

StressedDev 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

In the United States, Gun sales are heavily regulated and require background checks. Manufacturers and stores cannot just sell a gun to anyone.

gabeio 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them

Uh... https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-...

There actually had been some attempts to make smart guns mandatory while not completely working out all of their "kinks" yet. But to your point they actually have attempted this, to some degree. At first they were thinking only to prevent police from having their weapons used against them, but they had attempted to expand the scope. Although after the cops didn't want it either and the push for them seems to have waned.

gruez 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

>Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers.

Internet companies aren't being asked to proactively block piracy sites either. They're asked to block IP addresses associated with known piracy sites, as determined by the courts.

>Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses

...only because the government aren't nervous about "ores and parts" getting in the hands of criminal or rival states. For many other items, suppliers are required to seek export licenses for certain goods[1], which is arguably an equal or higher bar than what you're describing. Such items aren't limited to stuff like explosives or munitions, it also includes benign stuff like certain metal alloys, and semiconductors. Also, Banks and other financial institutions are required to proactively look for sanctions evasion activity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...

freedomben 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

They do if they're made illegal. Laws are just made up anyway and only relevant because people with the means to enforce them (aka guns) exist.

I think intellectual property laws need radical overhaul and reduction, and I think the current iteration is based on shakey philosophical principles anyway, but you won't get very far with straw men arguments, over-reductionism, or bad legal advice.

adolph 3 days ago | root | parent |

To recap:

  >>> . . . worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common
  >> On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
  > Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
I’ll restate the point: laws that address the means and not the behavior are ripe for abuse. That some exist doesn’t justify their expansion.

aftbit 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did.

I'm not sure that's the right line for society, but it's my personal line.

krisoft 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

While I understand that this is your personal line and your decision, I don't understand how you mean "an actual human being is harmed".

Clearly no human being is harmed by smashing the windows of a private car. (assuming that neither the smasher nor anyone else gets hurt in the actual act of the smashing.) As a first order of approximation no human got harmed, they weren't even there when their car's window got smashed. As a second order approximation obviously we know the private car's owner will need to replace the windows which will cost them.

At the same time shoplifting from Walmart is also a cost which is born by everyone who shops at Walmart. Walmart will put that cost into the price of items. They will also put the cost of anti-theft items in the price of things too. Plus those anti-theft measures will harm the non-thieves by inconveniencing them. So everyone will pay just a bit more because of the shoplifting. These costs and inconveniences add up quickly.

Why is one of these costs within the line and the other is outside the line? What makes one of them "actual human being is harmed" while the other not?

brewdad 2 days ago | root | parent |

It's a bit like the insurance market. We buy insurance because bearing the cost of misfortune is too much to bear as an individual.

In the same way, paying hundreds of dollars to fix a broken window is a significant burden to the individual owner. Paying an extra dollar on my Walmart bill is much easier to absorb.

gruez 2 days ago | root | parent |

Even if we grant everything you said, if you adopt that as your moral/legal system, the "extra dollar" will quickly snowball into hundreds to thousands of dollars as everyone realizes that they can steal with impunity.

gruez 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

>Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did.

Both examples aren't exactly clear lines. The walmart example arguably affects "actual human beings" by raising prices, or at the very least, making the shopping experience worse. See: stores in the US where anything vaguely high value is locked up and you need to call an employee over to open it. The car window smashing example could result in no economic loss for the owner, if the owner has comprehensive 0 deductible insurance, or if the car is a company car. There's also plenty of activity that we ought to ban even if there's no "actual human being is harmed", eg. speeding, or tax evasion.

bentley 2 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't.

So to take a recent example from my city (one of those cities so full of rampant petty theft that stores now inconvenience everybody by locking up toiletries), you don’t have a problem with this rich asshole with a $150,000 salary and his two disrespectful, disruptive teenagers stealing steaks and Monsters from Walmart?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0DoAkzdQig

Reventlov 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service

Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service

Really, I see no downside to this court decision.

Fizzadar 3 days ago | prev | next |

We really need a competitor(s- ideally) to CF because it’s heavily centralising the internet and this highlights exactly why that is a problem.

Andoryuuta 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

There are multiple competitors though.

See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on.

People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.

miohtama 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

Cloudflare has easiest usability and generous free tier

sureIy 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

This. They caught me when they started offering decent DNS UI, held me when they gave me one-click SSL, and sealed the deal when they let me buy domains at cost.

I don't care what AWS offers because there's no way I'm venturing into that for my simple domains.

mcmcmc 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Free tiers are probably one of the most damaging practices for competition in the market for cloud services

jitl 3 days ago | root | parent |

Weird take. I might try all the services with free tiers, see which one works the best, and give that service my business in the long term. Like, how else to evaluate competing vendors? If there’s no free tier it means everything I want to try requires I wade through “sales motion”, and I’ll end up picking conservatively based on reputation because it’s harder/more annoying to evaluate multiple vendors. That seems less competitive - “no one got fired for buying IBM” attitude.

jeroenhd 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

There's a difference between free tiers and trials. A trial is fine, but the unlimited free tiers offered now are a part of a race to the bottom that make it so only the largest, most investor-backed companies and loss-leaders can effectively compete.

mcmcmc 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Sure, it’s great from the consumer perspective in the short run. But how much does needing a free tier to attract customers raise the barrier to entry for the market? The only companies that can compete are those with existing infrastructure and revenue streams that can subsidize their losses. Even ZIRP couldn’t counteract that. There is a reason that predatory pricing is illegal.

Would strongly recommend Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”

mgbmtl 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm all for competition, but smaller players would have been completely blocked by Privacy Shield, whereas they cannot block CloudFlare completely without breaking a lot of other sites.

And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.

silisili 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The CDN industry is shrinking, not growing. There isn't any margin to play with anymore.

Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.

jitl 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

I think the product offerings from CDN companies are the best / most interesting they’ve ever been, compared to the overall IaaS space. “Edge computing” was a meme phrase a few years ago but really there’s no way to beat the speed of light besides putting your stuff closer to users.

pixelesque 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Maybe, but The Pirate Bay (at least last week when I looked) were sending cf-ray cookies, so I assume CF are "helping"/"protecting" (depending on what service they're using?) them, and The Pirate Bay's sort of been around (despite best efforts by some governments) for years...

gruez 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard

Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client

>Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]

...including piracy sites

>DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks

>Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.

neonsunset 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

There are! But most have only a small part of marketshare. The issue is less so in services provided and more so in sheer scale. Hopefully that will change eventually :)

BadHumans 3 days ago | prev | next |

The article says Cloudflare has tried to geoblock just certain IPs in Italy but what if Cloudflare tells Italy to stuff it and just withdraws from providing services to the country entirely?

donor20 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I think fine to order blocking in Italy - it's an italian court after all. But if they start doing the sort of global blocks folks have tried with X, then just withdraw services.

jonny_eh 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

CF's customers may not like that.

BadHumans 3 days ago | root | parent |

Take it up with the government that forced the choice.

EasyMark 2 days ago | root | parent |

You mean fire the government trying to destroy a free and open internet, while they still have the choice to do it. I really wish there was more of this whole sale firing of representatives that betray the interests of their country to support the megacorps

RantyDave 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm sure someone in Cloudflare did the math before they went to court and decided their business in Italy was worth saving. If it was, say, the Channel Islands they'd probably just tell them to stuff it.

rad_gruchalski 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

[flagged]

placardloop 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

That’s not an apt comparison. X wanted to keep operating in Brazil without following the law, so Brazil suspended them.

The parent commenter is talking about Cloudflare stopping operations in Italy of their own accord.

rad_gruchalski 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> The parent commenter is talking about Cloudflare stopping operations in Italy of their own accord.

The end result is the same.

placardloop 3 days ago | root | parent |

Just because the end result is the same doesn’t make it an accurate comparison or an insightful comment, especially given your comment was about motivations, not results.

rad_gruchalski 3 days ago | root | parent |

No clue how you arrived at a conclusion that my comment was about motivation. But who cares, you know better what I said.

jimbob45 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

X wanted to keep operating in Brazil without following the law

That’s certainly one way to characterize that situation.

brightball 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

What happened there?

blackeyeblitzar 3 days ago | root | parent |

A Brazilian judge named Alexandre de Moraes was going on a power trip, banning content and even people outright from social media. He issued unilateral orders to Twitter/X to perform this state censorship. Twitter/X refused, even though they comply with such orders elsewhere, because the orders were unconstitutional per Brazil’s own constitution. They also went public with the orders despite gag orders from this judge to keep the censorship secret. News outlets like the NYT have labeled de Moraes as a threat to democracy (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...), for his long standing crusade against various activists, journalists, and politicians. The judge the issued orders to arrest Twitter’s lawyers in Brazil or something like that, which seemed very aggresive. So this turned into an international fiasco. The judge eventually ordered Brazil’s ISPs to block Twitter/X. That ban lasted for a little bit and then for some unknown reasons (maybe conversations between Twitter/X and the judge?) Twitter/X access was restored but some partial amount (?) of censorship was performed. Along the way Twitter/X also launched an account detailing the kind of censorship that had been forced on them in secret, along with comparisons against Brazilian law (https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479).

jmclnx 3 days ago | prev | next |

No surprise with this, I wonder how long before this type of blocking is applied to all sites. That is what happens when large sites depend upon large companies like cloudflare.

Already some sites are blocking people that use VPNs, I could also see this expanding as time goes on.

someothherguyy 3 days ago | root | parent |

It is commonplace to block a VPN address block if you are experiencing tenacious malicious traffic. Its a consequence of sharing address space with bad actors, not something a service would likely be pursuing without cause.

dilyevsky 3 days ago | prev | next |

The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws continues to elevate every year. It’s puzzling to me what makes it so different even from other European countries

ignoramous 3 days ago | root | parent |

> The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws ...

Unsure about the state of affairs in Iberia, but the TFA is about Italia.

iosonofuturista 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Besides, there is more than one country in Iberia

aftbit 3 days ago | root | parent |

Huh, including a little bit of France, TIL.

bmacho 3 days ago | root | parent |

The current political configuration of the Iberian Peninsula comprises the bulk of Portugal and Spain, the whole landlocked microstate of Andorra, a small part of the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (French Cerdagne), and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_di...

shiroiushi 2 days ago | root | parent |

Since a peninsula is just an extension of a larger landmass, isn't the exact line dividing the "peninsula" from the rest of the land mass somewhat arbitrary? It seems like it's arguable whether Andorra is on the peninsula or not. Looking at a map, it seems to me like you could draw the line between Bayonne, France, to Tarragona, Spain, leaving Andorra out. Conversely, you could draw the line between Bayonne and La Palma (just south of Narbonne), which would include a decent chunk of France. Disclaimer: I am not a geographer.

wat10000 2 days ago | root | parent |

It is pretty arbitrary, but in this case there’s broad agreement due to there being an obvious dividing line in the form of the Pyrenees.

cutler 3 days ago | prev | next |

Trouble is this could easily lead to CDN, IP and proxy manipulation by state actors for repressive ends.

ollybee 3 days ago | prev | next |

I wonder how it works that they are banned from "routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield”. With a naive approach anyone who controlled the DNS records for a site present on the privacy shield could cause some serious mischief.

zb3 3 days ago | prev | next |

Let's block all Italy and see how fast they backtrack :)

drdaeman 3 days ago | root | parent |

Sanctions like this only works if 1) the people (en masse) are not against those bans, but don't feel strongly in favor of them either; and 2) the politicians genuinely represent the will of the people and react to their demands. There could be more conditions that I'm missing here, but I can think only of those two.

If that's correct, it may work. But if that's not the case - it only makes things worse.

zb3 3 days ago | root | parent |

Assume people are against these bans - just like against banning stuff in the EU. I'm one of those.

So what did the EU achieve? I still access unavailable services via TOR/VPN, these laws still don't protect me and US companies are still not liable.

Laws only work if you have enough power to enforce them.

drdaeman 3 days ago | root | parent |

> Assume people are against these bans

Yes, that's what I suspect. And that's why blocking even more online resources is not a working approach. It just won't have any positive effect.

> So what did the EU achieve?

Well, my guess would be weakening of their political institutions. Passing laws that aren't supported by large swathes of the population, and that won't be consistently enforced is a battle-tested recipe component for undermining a democracy.

1oooqooq 3 days ago | prev |

[flagged]

freedomben 3 days ago | root | parent |

"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a risky strategy, especially when that friend is the state backed up by massive corporation(s). They don't share your principles, and if you think they'll be satisfied with this and will never go after torrent sites and the like, I think you're sorely mistaken.

1oooqooq 2 days ago | root | parent |

it's not even that deep. you only think it's related because the inflammatory wording used in the article to try to make it about content freedom.

this is about a very openly obvious crime that harms the good pirate community just the same.