US federal judge rules Cloudflare is not liable for copyright infringement between websites that use its services
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica :
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling closes a loop opened in 2017, when a district court held in an RIAA case that DMCA protections did not shield Cloudflare from anti-piracy injunctions — a finding that positioned the CDN as a legal chokepoint for rights holders chasing pirate sites through their infrastructure. The new decision flips that framing: a US federal judge now holds Cloudflare not liable for infringement happening between the websites it serves.
The verdict also lands alongside the Ninth Circuit's 2023 determination that Instagram bore no liability for infringing embedded images on BuzzFeed News and Time, building a consistent judicial line that distribution and embedding layers escape liability even as the underlying sites remain exposed.
First-order effects
- Cloudflare gains durable legal cover against claims that it facilitates piracy merely by routing or caching traffic for infringing sites, removing a litigation overhang that dated to the 2017 RIAA-era ruling.
- Rights holders lose the infrastructure shortcut: pursuing infringing content now means going after each site operator directly rather than pressing one intermediary with an injunction.
Second-order effects
- Other CDNs, hosts, and reverse proxies can cite this precedent — together with the Instagram embed ruling — when defending themselves against the same liability theory, weakening injunction strategies built around intermediaries.
- Enforcement pressure redistributes toward the origin: takedown demand shifts to hosting providers and registrars closer to the infringing site itself, raising per-site enforcement costs for groups like the RIAA.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, liability concentrates on whoever copies or serves the content directly — a line visible in the judge's refusal to dismiss Reddit's copyright claims against Perplexity and data scrapers, where the defendants were accused of taking content themselves rather than merely transmitting it.
- Intermediary immunity at the distribution layer becomes structural: platform business models like Cloudflare's scale without carrying copyright risk, while direct-content businesses bear it — an asymmetry regulators may eventually be pressed to address.
The trend: Judicial doctrine is hardening a two-tier copyright map in which transmission and embedding layers are immune while anyone who copies or serves content directly stays liable.