LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Cloudflare, the controversial DDOS protection and a web infrastructure provider, won a partial legal victory over models and adult content creators who sued the company and the operators of the Thothub website for pirating copyrighted content.
U.S. District Court Judge Fernando M. Olguin granted a motion to dismiss copyright infringement claims alleged in the lawsuit claiming that the software company reportedly enabled Thothub (now shut down) to continue to violate copyright laws.
“Although Cloudflare challenges the veracity of the allegations in the [first amended complaint], on a motion to dismiss, the court must accept the factual allegations of the complaint as true,” argued Judge Olguin. TorrentFreak, a file-sharing industry news website, reported that Cloudflare was accused of a “permissive approach” which led to the “infringement is why Thothub…used Cloudflare’s services.”
Niece Waidhofer, an OnlyFans creator and plaintiff in the case, claims Cloudfare “concealed Thothub’s true ownership and server locations, which “is a major selling point for Cloudflare,” as it “markets to pirate sites by proclaiming that it will ‘mask’ their IP and not cooperate with [the] law.”
Given numerous takedown requests, received about Thothub “and the obvious nature of Thothub’s piracy,” Cloudflare “knew or was willfully blind to the rampant copyright infringement taking place on Thothub, yet [it] continued to support th[e] infringing activity.”
The plaintiffs maintain that Cloudflare allowed the existence of Thothub through their software and refused to cut ties due to legal violations.
Piracy claims are limited to Cloudflare. The company which owns Chaturbate was also listed as a defendant in the Waidhofer filing. The court dismissed the claims of contributory copyright violations for Chaturbate. The RICO claims were also dismissed, with prejudice. In the initial complaint, Cloudflare also was accused of RICO violations. Counsel representing Waidhofer and the plaintiff class later amended the legal complaint to exclude the RICO accusations, however.
The anonymous operators behind Thothub — the “John Does” named in the initial complaint — have not been identified since the complaint was filed. The claims against the site’s alleged operators have thus been dropped from the lawsuit.
The issue dealing with Cloudflare’s enabling of piracy remains the key point of contention. Since intellectual property theft remains a crisis in the adult entertainment industry, the models maintain that more needs to be done to end rampant content piracy.
YNOT will continue to monitor and report on the progress of the case.
