Cloudflare, a major Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider, has joined the effort to block access to over 200 pirate site domains for UK users. This marks a significant departure from the previous model, in which UK internet service providers (ISPs) like BT, Virgin Media, and Sky had been implementing these blocks based on court orders. The recent change involves Cloudflare, which now displays **Error 451 – Unavailable for Legal Reasons** to users attempting to access these domains.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA), a coalition of major film studios, is believed to have requested these blocks, with the High Court in London issuing the court orders. The use of dynamic injunctions allows for the blocking of additional domains linked to the same legal action, though the details are rarely made public. One potential candidate for the original order is a court case from December 2022, which targeted domains with well-known pirate brands such as 123movies, fmovies, and soap2day. This raises questions about Cloudflare’s involvement, since the notice it displays is tied to a request sent to Google, not to Cloudflare itself.
From information obtained independently, one candidate is an original order obtained in December 2022 which requested blocking of domains with well known pirate brands including 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix, and onionplay. This leads directly to another unusual issue. The notice linked from Cloudflare doesn’t directly concern Cloudflare. The studios sent the notice to Google after Google agreed to voluntarily remove those domains from its search indexes, if it was provided with a copy of relevant court orders. Notices like these were supplied and the domains were deindexed, and the practice has continued ever since. That raises questions about the nature of Cloudflare’s involvement here and why it links to the order sent to Google; notices sent to Cloudflare are usually submitted to Lumen by Cloudflare itself. That doesn’t appear to be the case here.