Cloudflare Can’t Be Forced to Use Piracy Shield to Block IPTV, Court Tells Serie A

Serie A's bid to force Cloudflare to participate in Piracy Shield, Italy's pirate IPTV blocking system, has failed. The Italian football league filed a legal complaint in April, claiming that Cloudflare assists and protects pirate services. In a decision handed down this week, the Court of Milan said that it has no legal authority to compel Cloudflare to join the program. The Court also denied Serie A's application for an injunction, for reasons that suggest this battle may not be over.

Despite providing a range of services for free that millions have come to rely on, and others that improve security and uptime for millions more, not everyone views Cloudflare’s key products as universally positive.

In Italy, where it took just a couple of weeks for the Piracy Shield blocking system and Cloudflare to start bumping heads, the reasons for conflict are on full display. Running from its core through to every product it develops, Cloudflare’s mission is to enable and protect online connectivity. Piracy Shield’s mission, to disrupt or terminate the connectivity of IPTV services, is exactly the opposite.

Friction was inevitable, and it began as predicted; a Cloudflare IP address was added to the Piracy Shield system, resulting in instant overblocking of innocent sites, just as the experts had warned, time and time again.

Yet despite innocent Cloudflare customers paying for that blunder with their own connectivity, the ability to continue blocking without causing further collateral damage exposed Piracy Shield’s limitations. And for that, Cloudflare received the blame.

Serie A Takes Legal Against Cloudflare

With Piracy Shield barely two months old, on April 3, 2024, Serie A filed a complaint against Cloudflare at the Court of Milan. Cloudflare’s services protect all who sign up for them but, while most customers are law-abiding, a minority are not. When IPTV providers use Cloudflare’s services, they not only achieve greater anonymity like any other user, their platforms become much more difficult for Piracy Shield to block. Serie A wants this situation brought to an end.

The football league used colorful drug-dealing analogies to paint a picture of Cloudflare providing “pirate match dealers” and their users with a “dealing room and the exit routes” to evade capture. Minus the imagery, Serie A’s claims boil down to the same thing; Cloudflare’s services greatly assist pirates, make anti-piracy measures much less effective, and Cloudflare won’t take the type of action Serie A believes it should.

Force Cloudflare to Participate in Piracy Shield

The existence of the Serie A complaint wasn’t revealed until the end of May when La Repubblica broke the story. But even then, what Serie A hoped to achieve and under what legislation still wasn’t made clear. The Court of Milan’s decision, dated Monday August 5, and reported by Cloudflare’s Italian legal team, fills in most of the gaps.

Early July, DAZN said it should be “mandatory for so-called intermediaries of electronic communication services, which allow pirates to hide from the Piracy Shield platform through their services, to be obliged to register with this platform.” Cloudflare wasn’t mentioned by name, but DAZN already knew what Serie A had demanded because the company and other interested parties were directly involved.

No Legal Basis

Serie A’s argument that Cloudflare should be compelled by court order to participate in the Piracy Shield blocking program, received support from interveners DAZN, Serie B, and Sky Italia. Cloudflare was represented by LMS Studio Legale, and the law firm’s announcement this week revealed good news for Cloudflare.

“Ludovico Anselmi and Giuseppe Cardona, partners at LMS Studio Legale, successfully assisted Cloudflare, an American company providing security services for Internet sites, in precautionary proceedings brought before the Court of Milan by Lega Serie A, with the intervention of Lega Serie B, DAZN and Sky Italia,” the law firm said.

“The appeal aimed to obtain an order to register Cloudflare on the ‘Piracy Shield’ platform established by AGCOM, as well as injunctive measures regarding the alleged provision of Cloudflare services to sites that had allegedly disseminated without authorization images of football matches on which the appellant claimed related rights.”

The decision, handed down by the Court of Milan’s Specialized Section, denied Serie A’s first request after finding that the power to impose registration to Piracy Shield sits beyond the scope of powers assigned to the Court.

A second claim, reportedly relating to Cloudflare’s behavior, was also dismissed. According to LMS, the judges said that the matter should have been heard in a trial on the merits.

Whether Serie A intends to take further action is currently unknown, but it’s clear that the influential football league can rely on support from AGCOM, including when the regulator meets with Cloudflare in September.

Cloudflare was also mentioned in the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of Parliament) last month in connection with Piracy Shield. The extracts below suggest that the commentary may have concluded with a veiled threat.

[I]t appears that following these first months of operation of the automated platform [Piracy Shield] there are entities that provide CDN services that allow pirate users to continue to enjoy the illegal viewing of content subject to a blocking order by AGCOM [..]

In particular, among these subjects, the role of Cloudflare stands out, a CDN and proxy service, which in addition to legal services, such as, for example, cloud connectivity and cyber threat protection services, effectively provides protection to sites that illegally transmit copyrighted content, by shielding their IP address, which would be subject to blocking on the Piracy Shield platform, making it effectively unidentifiable [..]

Cloudflare also provides its services to the public administration. If the circumstance were confirmed, we would be faced with the circumstance that Cloudflare would provide lawful services to the public administration and unlawful services to criminal organizations that manage audiovisual piracy activities.

Whether the Ministers questioned, to the extent of their competence, are aware of the above and whether they are aware of which State administrations use, including through third-party companies, the services offered by Cloudflare, and can provide a list of them; whether the above is confirmed with regard to public administrations and, in the event of an affirmative answer, whether they do not deem it appropriate to take the initiatives within their competence to determine the end of such collaboration.