Cloudflare Must Block Pirate Serie A Domains and IP Addresses to Comply with ‘Piracy Shield’

• Cloudflare was ordered by a Milan court to find and expose customers who use its infrastructure for piracy.
• Unlike the U.S., Italy found Cloudflare liable for third-party copyright infringement. 
• The company must block domains and IPs flagged under the country’s anti-piracy framework.

The Court of Milan has issued a groundbreaking order requiring Cloudflare to block pirate streaming services that offer Serie A football matches under Italy's ‘Piracy Shield’ legislation, a pioneering anti-piracy framework designed to combat unauthorized access to live sports streams.  

The court found Cloudflare's services, including its content delivery network (CDN), DNS resolver, WARP VPN, and reverse proxy capabilities, instrumental in bypassing the restrictions imposed by the Piracy Shield system. 

Furthermore, the company must identify and disclose data on customers who use its infrastructure for illegal streaming. This includes connection logs, IP addresses, timestamps, traffic volume, and data related to Cloudflare’s VPN services if linked to the breaches.  

Cloudflare must now cease resolving the domain names and routing traffic to IP addresses associated with all services flagged under Piracy Shield, including future domains and aliases utilized by pirate providers.  

Serie A had previously sought legal remedies to involve Cloudflare in anti-piracy actions. While an earlier court ruling concluded it lacked jurisdiction to compel Cloudflare’s participation in the Piracy Shield initiative, Serie A’s subsequent appeal reversed this decision. 

The Court of Milan ruled that Cloudflare had made a "causal contribution" to copyright infringement by enabling users to circumvent Piracy Shield blocks.  

This ruling has far-reaching implications for Cloudflare’s operations, especially given its history of positioning itself as a neutral intermediary. The court’s decision reinforces Cloudflare’s legal accountability when its services are used to facilitate piracy.  

Italy’s Piracy Shield system has not been without controversy. Instances of over-blocking, including disruptions to services like Google Drive and legitimate websites, have raised questions about the robustness and scalability of the framework.

Cloudflare, previously able to mitigate similar issues by geotargeting its blocks to Italy, may attempt a similar localized approach as it implements these new legal obligations. Failure to meet the court’s demands promptly would result in a penalty of €10,000 per day.