https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Media-Entertainment/Anime-music-piracy-website-closes-after-industry-goes-to-court
'Hikari No Akari' drew millions of visits from Indonesia, U.S. and France
I'm no expert but using Cloudflare for your piracy feels like a bold move. A stupid move, but bold.
All the big pirate sites use them though. Even private ones like TL. If they don’t they get DDOSed. They all turned it on over the past year or so after being badly attacked.
By whom and why would the sites get DDOSed if they didn't use Cloudflare? Am I wrong to assume that internet traffic is just as trackable for the internet provider if the server traffic first visits Cloudflare vs just using whatever the provider...uhhh...provides?
Mind you, while I can follow a logical argument, most stuff concerning networks like the internet still feels like magic to me for the most part. We use Cloudflare because, after reading up on it a little bit, I got the notion that it would likely improve our connection speed and especially the loading speed of my gf's webtoon sites. But that's about the extent of my knowledge.
Okay but they used Cloudflare's CDN. As in, the pirated content was on Cloudflare's servers. That's a bold move, in my book.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari's operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.
"We'll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action," an RIAJ spokesperson said.
The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.
"Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don't need to be translated for anyone to enjoy," says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.
The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.
This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.
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