CloudFlare sued by porn baron for providing anti-DDoS services to piracy websites

Advertising network Tiger Media also under fire from adult entertainment company ALS Scan

Security company CloudFlare is being sued by an online adult entertainment firm for providing its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation service to piracy websites. The lawsuit, filed by ALS Scan, which has a record of aggressively asserting what it believes are the firm's intellectual property rights, also accuses online advertising company Tiger Media of profiting from piracy websites.

"This case involves repetitive infringement of ALS's copyrighted works on 'pirate' internet sites, those with no apparent function other than to display infringing adult content," the company claimed in court documents.

"This piracy is supported by third-party service providers who continue doing business with such pirate sites, even after they receive repeated actual notice of infringement on the pirate sites."

The suit goes on to accuse CloudFlare, and any other company doing business with piracy websites, of profiting "from the draw of infringement, while failing to terminate services to these pirate sites as repeat infringers".

Piracy sites "monetise" their traffic with advertising and via brokers that pay to receive web traffic from websites, including piracy sites, according to ALS.

Tiger Media, meanwhile, runs the Juicy Ads online advertising business and has been targeted by ALS Scan along with Tiger's founder and owner and 10 unnamed individuals who will be identified at a later date.

The ALS suit follows accusations by a business lobbying group called the Digital Citizens Alliance that CloudFlare helps piracy sites, like the Pirate Bay, to stay online. The Alliance also accused piracy sites of helping to distribute malware and, by extension, CloudFlare of aiding this practice.

ALS's track record of using increasingly tough US laws to target organisations it believes have infringed its copyrights goes back to at least 2000.

Founded in 1996, it was one of the first media companies to take advantage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act by trying to sue ISPs. In one case in 2000, ALS sued ISP RemarQ Communities for allowing users to download pirated media via newsgroups hosted by the firm.

Computing has contacted CloudFlare for comment but had not received a reply at the time of publishing.