Mon Cheri Bridals, LLC v. Cloudflare, Inc.

Background

Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs sell wedding dresses online. They said counterfeit retailers harmed their sales and brand reputations by selling knock-off dresses using the plaintiffs’ copyrighted images. After pursuing infringers in other actions, the plaintiffs sought to hold Cloudflare responsible for contributory copyright infringement based on services Cloudflare provided to infringing websites.

The plaintiffs relied on two groups of Cloudflare services. Performance-improvement services included a content-distribution network and caching capabilities that were intended primarily to make webpage content load faster. Security services placed Cloudflare between users and the hosts of the underlying content, allowing Cloudflare to detect suspicious traffic and prevent attacks on website hosts.

Legal standard

The court explained that contributory copyright infringement requires proof that the defendant knew about another party’s infringement and either materially contributed to it or induced it. Merely providing services to a copyright infringer is not enough. In the internet context, material contribution may exist when a service facilitates access to infringing websites in a way that significantly magnifies the infringement or constitutes an essential step in the infringement process.

Performance-improvement services

The court held that the plaintiffs had not presented evidence from which a jury could find that Cloudflare’s performance-improvement services materially contributed to infringement. The plaintiffs’ only evidence about the services’ effects consisted of promotional material from Cloudflare’s website. The court found that these general statements did not address Cloudflare’s effect on the specific infringement at issue.

The plaintiffs had not shown that faster loading, assuming Cloudflare made the websites load faster, would likely lead to significantly more infringement than would occur without Cloudflare. The court also held that Cloudflare’s services were not an essential step in the infringement process because removing infringing material from Cloudflare’s cache would not remove it from the hosting server or prevent users from seeing the copyrighted image.

Security services

The court also held that Cloudflare’s security services did not materially contribute to the infringement. From the viewpoint of a user accessing the infringing websites, those services made no difference. The services did affect third parties’ ability to identify the hosting provider and the server’s internet address.

The court noted that Cloudflare might face liability if its services made it harder for third parties to report infringement to the host and obtain removal of the content. But the parties agreed that Cloudflare identified the host in response to a copyright complaint and forwarded the complaint to the host provider. On that record, the court found no material contribution by Cloudflare.

Disposition

The court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and granted Cloudflare’s motion for summary judgment. The opinion also states that the plaintiffs initially moved for summary judgment against the unidentified defendants but abandoned that part of the motion in their reply brief. The court scheduled a case-management conference to discuss what remained of the case.