12 ms·

Sony's Legal Attack on Quad9, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech

168 points by elliewithcolor 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago
I dunno... Property rights are the foundation of a free market society. I feel like Sony should get the benefit of the doubt here.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  If Sony has a problem with a specific site, the appropriate approach is to find and exert legal actions on that site itself. To go back to a pre-internet model: If you know ABC Pawn Shop is fencing stolen merchandise from your warehouse, you deal with ABC Pawn directly. Find and sue their owners, get the cops to raid them, whatever. You don't dance around and call the phone company and say "don't respond if anyone calls 411 and asks for ABC Pawn" or tell Rand McNally to take their address off of the street map and hope that solves the problem. A lot of IP litigation seems to be focused on middlemen-- DNS providers, ad networks, ISPs, search engines-- lately. I suspect they've decided this is the "easier" target to hit. It's easier to serve a company with an above-board legal presence than some unknown in darkness-knows-what country. They also know that most legal players will decide it's cheaper to cave and deplatform their targets, rather than pay for the showdown in the courts over their actual legal responsibility. It also seems a cleverly distasteful way around the fundamental concepts of Western legal systems-- that we settle disputes between the parties actually in conflict, rather than swiping at peripherally-related proxies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - arp242 4y ago
    Except that "ABC pawn shop" is located in Russia or China or some other corrupt authoritarian regime and that taking any action against them it not realistic. It's not the "easier" target to hit; it's often the only target to hit.
    - superkuh 4y ago
      Target is an interesting word choice here because it doesn't have a valance or imply anything about the ethical or legal responsibility (because there is none). In this case hitting an easier target is like attacking someone random on the street just because they're there rather than going to the target responsible and attacking it.
      - arp242 4y ago
        Of course it's not a "random person"; it's a service that's directly involved with providing access to (allegedly) illegal content. Should access to this content be prevented through this means, or at all? People can reasonably disagree on various aspects of that. But "random person" is a ridiculous comparison.
        superkuh 4y ago
        I suppose you're right. It's more like targeting the street signs for vandalism because it's too far to walk to the house of the guy you want to attack.
    - Tozen 4y ago
      This is like making the excuse that if somebody specific robs you, that retaliating against 3rd parties walking down the street that didn't do it and don't have any direct connection is legit. If there is a beef about a violation, then take it up with those specific persons and entities. It's not acceptable to lash out and bully everybody. Worse yet, when the person is among the richest people in the room, so wants to stomp on the poor or others because they feel like it or to vent their rage. Indiscriminate destruction of everyone's rights, freedoms, and privacy for an already rich company's profit margins, is plain wrong.
      - arp242 4y ago
        They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods. They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site. No one is being "bullied"; is the postal service being "bullied" when they're told to stop delivering meth over the post, or illegal firearms, or child pornography?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nix23 4y ago
  >I feel like Sony should get the benefit of the doubt here Free market and "benefit of the doubt here" because Sony...that's really something.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Unlike intellectual property rights, which are temporary monopolies granted by government to creators in order to encourage more creation.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Copyright is anything but temporary.
- Matl 4y ago
  'Intellectual property' is definitely a more controversial concept than you make it sound. Definitely more so than say 'physical property' or 'personal property' would be.
- hermitdev 4y ago
  No, the benefit of the doubt should go to the accused. Sony should have to prove their case in a court of law. Due process must be upheld.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Sorry they lost benefit of the doubt a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
moremetadata 4y ago
This is another DMCA take down, with lazy judges imposing their ignorance on those they can impose it on and not the criminals. Sony should be going after the web hosters, but then Sony have a history of interpreting the law their way when they included a Rootkit on CD's [1]. Similar situatians can be seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659768 Maybe Quad9 needs Pirate Bay's lawyers, if this isnt a subtle revenue generating exercise? https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-proxy-defeats-polices-github-takedown-with-dmca-counternotice-230204/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-proxy-defeats-polices-gi... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- Hikikomori 4y ago
  DMCA in Germany?
  - betaby 4y ago
    Developed countries have DMCA copycats. For Germany see 97a https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...
- trvz 4y ago
  > This is another DMCA take down, with lazy judges imposing their ignorance on those they can impose it on and not the criminals. The court location has specifically been chosen because of its friendliness towards copyright holders. Sony is not being lazy or stupid here, but malicious.
jonas-w 4y ago
IMO the first step to take down a website from the internet should be the domain registrar and hosting provider, if you are a big company or just a normal guy that thinks this page violates xyz. It is very easy to find out the domain registrar and it may work to just a write a simple email, without the need for a lawsuite. And if they don't do what you think would be right, you *could* start a lawsuite with *them.* Finding out the hosting provider *can* be easy, but sometimes it is impossible (cloudflare, etc). But even then looking up where the traffic goes is not that hard and writing them a simple email is also not that hard. Again, if they don't do what you think would be right, you *could* start a lawsuite with *them*. Maybe they have done that and they both didn't comply, but why are they now fighting with a DNS resolver? This doesn't solve anything, anyone can still access that site, if they use another dns resolver or do the recursive resolving themselve.
- causality0 4y ago
  Absolutely not. The domain registrar does not own my server and they should have nothing to do with what's on it. DMCA notices should be issued to me, and if I ignore them I should be sued. If I lose the suit then an order should be issued to my hosting provider to take my server offline.
  - talhah 4y ago
    You're right that the domain registrar does not own the server but they do however own the domain which you point to your server. The domain registrar reserves the right to retract their domain if its misused such as pointing to illegal content. What counts as illegal content is sometimes vague but thats another issue in itself. I do agree with your sentiment that the DMCA notice should be sent to the site first but in the end, hosting providers and domain registrars still have some rights and policies which you have to comply with.
    - causality0 4y ago
      some rights and policies which you have to comply with. Correct, but determining whether the content on my server is illegal is the province of a court, not my registrar, and certainly not some asshole lawyer who has no liability for false takedowns.
doctor_eval 4y ago
I’ve never heard of quad9 before. Sounds cool. Anyone using them?
- selfhoster69 4y ago
  I was using Quad9 until they had infra issues where latency skyrocketed from ~40ms to an unstable ~250ms... soon after I noticed that the routing was changed to another country with a latency of stable ~70ms. A DNS resolver in another country breaks several things for me such as Wi-Fi Calling and certain CDNs that do not support EDNS Client Subnet, so I'm using Cloudflare Gateway DNS (DoH) for the time being.
- hoherd 4y ago
  I use them as my upstream DNS provider for pihole. I've only run into a few cases where I've had to switch to something else because their anti-malware DNS results was overzealous. I don't recall the specific cases.
- nix23 4y ago
  Yep for everything, since ~5 years.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I use it too. It's pretty good. Despite being relatively unknown, there's some big partners behind it like IBM.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Given that IBM owns 9, it would have to have IBM behind it!
- implements 4y ago
  Yeah, DNS over TLS using unwind on OpenBSD - never had any problems with their service.
- palata 4y ago
  Have been using them for years, never had a single issue.
goldcd 4y ago
In the UK we've had ISPs being forced to block sites for a while. Fortunately, it provides a handy list of providers to use with your VPN. e.g. https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders
- Twirrim 4y ago
  They didn't even have to legally mandate it, "suggestions" were made that certain particularly rabid newspapers would start publishing damning articles about which ISPs weren't filtering out paedophile material. Filters were essentially in place as far back as ~2007.
hoherd 4y ago
The fact that they are going after a single DNS resolver instead of directly going after the site hosting the content is a huge red flag. If Sony wins, it does not solve this specific copyright violation claim for Sony because the content is still available and resolvable through all the other DNS resolvers online. It just sets legal precedence that corporations can assert arbitrary censorship through third parties by claiming copyright infringement.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > It just sets legal precedence that corporations can assert arbitrary censorship through third parties by claiming copyright infringement. This is already the case though. Copyright monopolists already can DMCA anything out of existence. Their accusations are assumed to be true based on "good faith" and other people are required to bend over backwards to take content down. Nobody is going to spend time and money fighting bullshit claims, they're just going to comply and move on. Which means these monopolists have de facto censorship powers. Sony in particular is very well known for abusing the legal system and their wealth to drive competitors out of business. They can afford to burn the money of their enemies by forcing them to fight frivolous lawsuits. If I remember right, they destroyed two commercial PlayStation emulators with bullshit lawsuits where they lost in court but won in the market.
  - hoherd 4y ago
    IANAL but doesn't DMCA only apply in USA, whereas this case is taking place in Europe, and would thus provide legal precedent in some European jurisdiction?
    - betaby 4y ago
      USA successfully enforces its laws everywhere https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-down-the-pirate-bay-171212/ https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-do...
    - saddlerustle 4y ago
      The DMCA is the US’s implementation of the 1996 WIPO copyright treaty, which almost the entire developed world has ratified.
bwoodcock 4y ago
Hi. I'm on the board of the Quad9 Foundation, if anyone has any questions about all this. But, by and large, the folks commenting in this thread are saying about what I would: when Sony goes after the DNS, AND NOT the site hosting what they say is infringing, it gives you a pretty clear picture of their goals.
- a3w 4y ago
  What will the next legal steps taken by quad9 be?
- marissachan 4y ago
  What could realistically happen if Quad9 just ignores this? If I am not mistaking you are based in Switzerland, while Sony sued in Germany. For me the legal system is honestly a little bit of a mystery when multiple countries are involved, and it is hard to follow due to how many different rules can apply.
  - bwoodcock 4y ago
    If Quad9 were based in the US, it could just ignore the whole thing. But then, if Quad9 were based in the US, it wouldn't have happened in the first place, because any US court, particularly the US District Court for Northern California, which is the jurisdiction Google and Cloudflare are in, would have thrown it right out. But Quad9 moved from that same jurisdiction in Northern California to Switzerland, and three days later, Sony attacked. Because of something called the Lugano Convention. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:22007A1221(03)&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... The Lugano Convention is a spectacularly ill-conceived treaty that allows plaintiffs to go jurisdiction-shopping in _any_ signatory country, even though it has no connection to either plaintiff or defendant, and then have the judgment enforced in _all_ signatory countries, even if it contradicts the national laws of those countries. Unfortunately, Switzerland is a Lugano Convention signatory, as it Germany. So although Swiss law is clear that Quad9 is in the right, and that was actually just tested and upheld by the Swiss supreme court a couple of years ago, that doesn't matter, because the Lugano Convention takes precedence over national law. Which is why people tend to get pretty upset about these kinds of treaties. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a similar sort of deal, which the US did _not_ sign, since it was so widely protested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership But, to get back to your specific question, if Quad9 were to just ignore this, Sony would go back to the court in Germany, and get some sort of finding that Quad9 was maliciously failing to comply, it would get damages, and it would request Swiss law enforcement to extract those damages from Quad9. Swiss law would not be able to protect Quad9, and Swiss LE would be obligated to act on Sony's behalf. At that point, Quad9 could only continue to exist by relocating its headquarters to a non-Lugano-Convention signatory country. When we evaluated national legal regimes for privacy protection, Switzerland was best, the Netherlands second-best, and Iceland third-best... All three are Lugano signatories, unfortunately. I'm not sure where we'd wind up, but it would be a huge blow for privacy.
nubinetwork 4y ago
Quad9 already blocks content they don't like... they just call them threat feeds. Edit: not that that's a bad thing, but it's disingenuous to say you're for free speech, and then block some websites and cry when you have to block others. Never half ass two things, whole ass one thing.
- waboremo 4y ago
  There is a substantial difference between being forced to block some sites, and choosing to block some. You know this, it's not disingenuous in the slightest. Especially when this sets precedent and others will have to follow suit. I can choose not to use Quad9 if I don't like who they choose to block/what filters they use. That stops being a possibility when all DNS providers are forced to block anything that could be viewed as copyright infringement.
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    > That stops being a possibility when all DNS providers are forced to block anything that could be viewed as copyright infringement. That already exists today with ISPs. Don't like it? Run your own internal resolver pointed at the root servers.
    - torified 4y ago
      >Run your own internal resolver pointed at the root servers. Any tutorials on how to do this?
    - waboremo 4y ago
      It sure does, and many dislike it ever happened which is why they're also trying to fight this. Surely you understand precedent.
- handsclean 4y ago
  Wanting yourself, not others, to decide what you say is not disingenuous at all, that’s what free speech is. I do think there’s a problem with economic and government pressure causing individual speech decisions to coalesce into emergent extralegal censorship, but surely just revoking free speech isn’t the way to fix that.
hackerfactor1 4y ago
This sounds like the same argument used when sites went after PirateBay for hosting pointers to content, even though they never hosted the content itself.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Truth is offending a copyright monopolist is a crime unto itself. The law will bend over backwards to make sure anyone "circumventing" their will is punished.
therealmarv 4y ago
Tried Quad9. Torrent sites blocked. Removed Quad9 and switched back to Cisco (dnscrypt was a requirement). I cannot tolerate censorship when I'm a grown up adult. I'm 90% sure this is Quad9 choice and not influenced by Sony.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Searched a bunch of (popular) torrent sites and some of their proxies on https://www.quad9.net/result https://www.quad9.net/result and they are all unblocked. Which ones got blocked for you? You could also use Quad9's unsecured DNS to check if it was blocked by their list or if something else was going on.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  You can run your own resolver
  - flangola7 4y ago
    What if root servers just take it down? Retract the domain registration, etc.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      Then noone could resolve it, including Quad9, CloudFlare, Cisco, Google etc.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Your resolver can resolve any domain to any IP. As long as it’s a static IP and the server is still there, you’d still have access as long as you had that mapping.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      > What if root servers just take it down? Root servers only control the mapping up to the TLD. That is, they for instance know the nameservers for ".br", but they know nothing about the nameservers for ".com.br", or about the domains below that. If your domain is "example.com.br", the nameservers which could "just take it down" are the nameservers for ".com.br", not the root nameservers. In the same way, the root servers are completely unrelated to domain registrations (other than pointing to nameservers which know about them).
bitwize 4y ago
Don't fuck with people's IP revenue stream unless you want to be slapped with felony contempt of business model charges.

I dunno... Property rights are the foundation of a free market society. I feel like Sony should get the benefit of the doubt here.

hakfoo 4y ago
If Sony has a problem with a specific site, the appropriate approach is to find and exert legal actions on that site itself. To go back to a pre-internet model: If you know ABC Pawn Shop is fencing stolen merchandise from your warehouse, you deal with ABC Pawn directly. Find and sue their owners, get the cops to raid them, whatever. You don't dance around and call the phone company and say "don't respond if anyone calls 411 and asks for ABC Pawn" or tell Rand McNally to take their address off of the street map and hope that solves the problem. A lot of IP litigation seems to be focused on middlemen-- DNS providers, ad networks, ISPs, search engines-- lately. I suspect they've decided this is the "easier" target to hit. It's easier to serve a company with an above-board legal presence than some unknown in darkness-knows-what country. They also know that most legal players will decide it's cheaper to cave and deplatform their targets, rather than pay for the showdown in the courts over their actual legal responsibility. It also seems a cleverly distasteful way around the fundamental concepts of Western legal systems-- that we settle disputes between the parties actually in conflict, rather than swiping at peripherally-related proxies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 4y ago
  Except that "ABC pawn shop" is located in Russia or China or some other corrupt authoritarian regime and that taking any action against them it not realistic. It's not the "easier" target to hit; it's often the only target to hit.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    Target is an interesting word choice here because it doesn't have a valance or imply anything about the ethical or legal responsibility (because there is none). In this case hitting an easier target is like attacking someone random on the street just because they're there rather than going to the target responsible and attacking it.
    - arp242 4y ago
      Of course it's not a "random person"; it's a service that's directly involved with providing access to (allegedly) illegal content. Should access to this content be prevented through this means, or at all? People can reasonably disagree on various aspects of that. But "random person" is a ridiculous comparison.
      - superkuh 4y ago
        I suppose you're right. It's more like targeting the street signs for vandalism because it's too far to walk to the house of the guy you want to attack.
  - Tozen 4y ago
    This is like making the excuse that if somebody specific robs you, that retaliating against 3rd parties walking down the street that didn't do it and don't have any direct connection is legit. If there is a beef about a violation, then take it up with those specific persons and entities. It's not acceptable to lash out and bully everybody. Worse yet, when the person is among the richest people in the room, so wants to stomp on the poor or others because they feel like it or to vent their rage. Indiscriminate destruction of everyone's rights, freedoms, and privacy for an already rich company's profit margins, is plain wrong.
    - arp242 4y ago
      They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods. They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site. No one is being "bullied"; is the postal service being "bullied" when they're told to stop delivering meth over the post, or illegal firearms, or child pornography?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nix23 4y ago
>I feel like Sony should get the benefit of the doubt here Free market and "benefit of the doubt here" because Sony...that's really something.
pessimizer 4y ago
Unlike intellectual property rights, which are temporary monopolies granted by government to creators in order to encourage more creation.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Copyright is anything but temporary.
Matl 4y ago
'Intellectual property' is definitely a more controversial concept than you make it sound. Definitely more so than say 'physical property' or 'personal property' would be.
hermitdev 4y ago
No, the benefit of the doubt should go to the accused. Sony should have to prove their case in a court of law. Due process must be upheld.
yencabulator 4y ago
Sorry they lost benefit of the doubt a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

moremetadata 4y ago

This is another DMCA take down, with lazy judges imposing their ignorance on those they can impose it on and not the criminals. Sony should be going after the web hosters, but then Sony have a history of interpreting the law their way when they included a Rootkit on CD's [1]. Similar situatians can be seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659768 Maybe Quad9 needs Pirate Bay's lawyers, if this isnt a subtle revenue generating exercise? https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-proxy-defeats-polices-github-takedown-with-dmca-counternotice-230204/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-proxy-defeats-polices-gi... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Hikikomori 4y ago
DMCA in Germany?
- betaby 4y ago
  Developed countries have DMCA copycats. For Germany see 97a https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...
trvz 4y ago
> This is another DMCA take down, with lazy judges imposing their ignorance on those they can impose it on and not the criminals. The court location has specifically been chosen because of its friendliness towards copyright holders. Sony is not being lazy or stupid here, but malicious.

jonas-w 4y ago

IMO the first step to take down a website from the internet should be the domain registrar and hosting provider, if you are a big company or just a normal guy that thinks this page violates xyz. It is very easy to find out the domain registrar and it may work to just a write a simple email, without the need for a lawsuite. And if they don't do what you think would be right, you *could* start a lawsuite with *them.* Finding out the hosting provider *can* be easy, but sometimes it is impossible (cloudflare, etc). But even then looking up where the traffic goes is not that hard and writing them a simple email is also not that hard. Again, if they don't do what you think would be right, you *could* start a lawsuite with *them*. Maybe they have done that and they both didn't comply, but why are they now fighting with a DNS resolver? This doesn't solve anything, anyone can still access that site, if they use another dns resolver or do the recursive resolving themselve.

causality0 4y ago
Absolutely not. The domain registrar does not own my server and they should have nothing to do with what's on it. DMCA notices should be issued to me, and if I ignore them I should be sued. If I lose the suit then an order should be issued to my hosting provider to take my server offline.
- talhah 4y ago
  You're right that the domain registrar does not own the server but they do however own the domain which you point to your server. The domain registrar reserves the right to retract their domain if its misused such as pointing to illegal content. What counts as illegal content is sometimes vague but thats another issue in itself. I do agree with your sentiment that the DMCA notice should be sent to the site first but in the end, hosting providers and domain registrars still have some rights and policies which you have to comply with.
  - causality0 4y ago
    some rights and policies which you have to comply with. Correct, but determining whether the content on my server is illegal is the province of a court, not my registrar, and certainly not some asshole lawyer who has no liability for false takedowns.

doctor_eval 4y ago

I’ve never heard of quad9 before. Sounds cool. Anyone using them?

selfhoster69 4y ago
I was using Quad9 until they had infra issues where latency skyrocketed from ~40ms to an unstable ~250ms... soon after I noticed that the routing was changed to another country with a latency of stable ~70ms. A DNS resolver in another country breaks several things for me such as Wi-Fi Calling and certain CDNs that do not support EDNS Client Subnet, so I'm using Cloudflare Gateway DNS (DoH) for the time being.
hoherd 4y ago
I use them as my upstream DNS provider for pihole. I've only run into a few cases where I've had to switch to something else because their anti-malware DNS results was overzealous. I don't recall the specific cases.
nix23 4y ago
Yep for everything, since ~5 years.
wkat4242 4y ago
I use it too. It's pretty good. Despite being relatively unknown, there's some big partners behind it like IBM.
- Nursie 4y ago
  Given that IBM owns 9, it would have to have IBM behind it!
implements 4y ago
Yeah, DNS over TLS using unwind on OpenBSD - never had any problems with their service.
palata 4y ago
Have been using them for years, never had a single issue.

goldcd 4y ago

In the UK we've had ISPs being forced to block sites for a while. Fortunately, it provides a handy list of providers to use with your VPN. e.g. https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders

Twirrim 4y ago
They didn't even have to legally mandate it, "suggestions" were made that certain particularly rabid newspapers would start publishing damning articles about which ISPs weren't filtering out paedophile material. Filters were essentially in place as far back as ~2007.

hoherd 4y ago

The fact that they are going after a single DNS resolver instead of directly going after the site hosting the content is a huge red flag. If Sony wins, it does not solve this specific copyright violation claim for Sony because the content is still available and resolvable through all the other DNS resolvers online. It just sets legal precedence that corporations can assert arbitrary censorship through third parties by claiming copyright infringement.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> It just sets legal precedence that corporations can assert arbitrary censorship through third parties by claiming copyright infringement. This is already the case though. Copyright monopolists already can DMCA anything out of existence. Their accusations are assumed to be true based on "good faith" and other people are required to bend over backwards to take content down. Nobody is going to spend time and money fighting bullshit claims, they're just going to comply and move on. Which means these monopolists have de facto censorship powers. Sony in particular is very well known for abusing the legal system and their wealth to drive competitors out of business. They can afford to burn the money of their enemies by forcing them to fight frivolous lawsuits. If I remember right, they destroyed two commercial PlayStation emulators with bullshit lawsuits where they lost in court but won in the market.
- hoherd 4y ago
  IANAL but doesn't DMCA only apply in USA, whereas this case is taking place in Europe, and would thus provide legal precedent in some European jurisdiction?
  - betaby 4y ago
    USA successfully enforces its laws everywhere https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-down-the-pirate-bay-171212/ https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-do...
  - saddlerustle 4y ago
    The DMCA is the US’s implementation of the 1996 WIPO copyright treaty, which almost the entire developed world has ratified.

bwoodcock 4y ago

Hi. I'm on the board of the Quad9 Foundation, if anyone has any questions about all this. But, by and large, the folks commenting in this thread are saying about what I would: when Sony goes after the DNS, AND NOT the site hosting what they say is infringing, it gives you a pretty clear picture of their goals.

a3w 4y ago
What will the next legal steps taken by quad9 be?
marissachan 4y ago
What could realistically happen if Quad9 just ignores this? If I am not mistaking you are based in Switzerland, while Sony sued in Germany. For me the legal system is honestly a little bit of a mystery when multiple countries are involved, and it is hard to follow due to how many different rules can apply.
- bwoodcock 4y ago
  If Quad9 were based in the US, it could just ignore the whole thing. But then, if Quad9 were based in the US, it wouldn't have happened in the first place, because any US court, particularly the US District Court for Northern California, which is the jurisdiction Google and Cloudflare are in, would have thrown it right out. But Quad9 moved from that same jurisdiction in Northern California to Switzerland, and three days later, Sony attacked. Because of something called the Lugano Convention. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:22007A1221(03)&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... The Lugano Convention is a spectacularly ill-conceived treaty that allows plaintiffs to go jurisdiction-shopping in _any_ signatory country, even though it has no connection to either plaintiff or defendant, and then have the judgment enforced in _all_ signatory countries, even if it contradicts the national laws of those countries. Unfortunately, Switzerland is a Lugano Convention signatory, as it Germany. So although Swiss law is clear that Quad9 is in the right, and that was actually just tested and upheld by the Swiss supreme court a couple of years ago, that doesn't matter, because the Lugano Convention takes precedence over national law. Which is why people tend to get pretty upset about these kinds of treaties. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a similar sort of deal, which the US did _not_ sign, since it was so widely protested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership But, to get back to your specific question, if Quad9 were to just ignore this, Sony would go back to the court in Germany, and get some sort of finding that Quad9 was maliciously failing to comply, it would get damages, and it would request Swiss law enforcement to extract those damages from Quad9. Swiss law would not be able to protect Quad9, and Swiss LE would be obligated to act on Sony's behalf. At that point, Quad9 could only continue to exist by relocating its headquarters to a non-Lugano-Convention signatory country. When we evaluated national legal regimes for privacy protection, Switzerland was best, the Netherlands second-best, and Iceland third-best... All three are Lugano signatories, unfortunately. I'm not sure where we'd wind up, but it would be a huge blow for privacy.

nubinetwork 4y ago

Quad9 already blocks content they don't like... they just call them threat feeds. Edit: not that that's a bad thing, but it's disingenuous to say you're for free speech, and then block some websites and cry when you have to block others. Never half ass two things, whole ass one thing.

waboremo 4y ago
There is a substantial difference between being forced to block some sites, and choosing to block some. You know this, it's not disingenuous in the slightest. Especially when this sets precedent and others will have to follow suit. I can choose not to use Quad9 if I don't like who they choose to block/what filters they use. That stops being a possibility when all DNS providers are forced to block anything that could be viewed as copyright infringement.
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  > That stops being a possibility when all DNS providers are forced to block anything that could be viewed as copyright infringement. That already exists today with ISPs. Don't like it? Run your own internal resolver pointed at the root servers.
  - torified 4y ago
    >Run your own internal resolver pointed at the root servers. Any tutorials on how to do this?
  - waboremo 4y ago
    It sure does, and many dislike it ever happened which is why they're also trying to fight this. Surely you understand precedent.
handsclean 4y ago
Wanting yourself, not others, to decide what you say is not disingenuous at all, that’s what free speech is. I do think there’s a problem with economic and government pressure causing individual speech decisions to coalesce into emergent extralegal censorship, but surely just revoking free speech isn’t the way to fix that.

hackerfactor1 4y ago

This sounds like the same argument used when sites went after PirateBay for hosting pointers to content, even though they never hosted the content itself.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
Truth is offending a copyright monopolist is a crime unto itself. The law will bend over backwards to make sure anyone "circumventing" their will is punished.

therealmarv 4y ago

Tried Quad9. Torrent sites blocked. Removed Quad9 and switched back to Cisco (dnscrypt was a requirement). I cannot tolerate censorship when I'm a grown up adult. I'm 90% sure this is Quad9 choice and not influenced by Sony.

waboremo 4y ago
Searched a bunch of (popular) torrent sites and some of their proxies on https://www.quad9.net/result https://www.quad9.net/result and they are all unblocked. Which ones got blocked for you? You could also use Quad9's unsecured DNS to check if it was blocked by their list or if something else was going on.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
You can run your own resolver
- flangola7 4y ago
  What if root servers just take it down? Retract the domain registration, etc.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Then noone could resolve it, including Quad9, CloudFlare, Cisco, Google etc.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Your resolver can resolve any domain to any IP. As long as it’s a static IP and the server is still there, you’d still have access as long as you had that mapping.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > What if root servers just take it down? Root servers only control the mapping up to the TLD. That is, they for instance know the nameservers for ".br", but they know nothing about the nameservers for ".com.br", or about the domains below that. If your domain is "example.com.br", the nameservers which could "just take it down" are the nameservers for ".com.br", not the root nameservers. In the same way, the root servers are completely unrelated to domain registrations (other than pointing to nameservers which know about them).

bitwize 4y ago

Don't fuck with people's IP revenue stream unless you want to be slapped with felony contempt of business model charges.