Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status
quad9.net
quad9.net
Hamburg is a favourite for such cases because they just have no clue about technology. They are just old fashioned.
As a small indie developer, I could not afford to keep on fighting. I gave up. I was a psychological wreck. And since it is not binding, big entities can afford to sue you non-stop.
Hamburg was the second time I was in a court. I got sued by the same big corporation. I won the first one.
Despite not being binding Sony will use this as a precedent and they will start going against the bigger DNS players, till all of them have to comply with their demands.
In Germany?! Never! /s
This reminds me how the gyms in Germany were told by the government they were not allowed to collect membership fees during the lockdown but the big chains did it anyway on the basis of "what are you gonna do about it?". So if you wanted gyms to comply, each customer had to take their gym to court on an individual basis but most never bothered.
It's crazy, from a foreigner's perspective, with how much shenanigans big business in Germany can get away with legally, considering how strict and bureaucratic Germany is. And don't get me started on customer service.
Eventually they'll sue you for damages, the court will rule that you have to stop what you are doing (as they already did so, and violating a court order seems like a surefire way to escalate the situation), plus the monetary compensation for the damages. And at that point it's just easy-peasy call the collections agency, and they'll just make your life more and more miserable by taking your stuff/car/home/etc. (Similarly if "you are" a company.)
I remember "the good old web" (tm) where people did stuff anonymosly. In this way people can stay safe and continue publishing stuff.
Honestly, if the world was run by such people, we would be still in discussions and evaluations.
Sometimes you just have to accept facts and move on.
See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht#Telemedienge...
Source: I'm a German, I publish websites.
Source: I am also a German, I publish .com websites.
I think the point here is to not disclose your identity online as a defense against bullshit lawsuits. Whether you agree with the approach itself is one thing, but if it works at protecting against lawsuits it'll definitely work at protecting against enforcement of this law.
Furthermore, when it comes to the lack of "impressum", merely determining whether the law has been broken would be difficult with proper anonymity. Let's say he's based in Germany but anonymously purchases hosting in the US or another country and never discloses his German residency on the website - in this case it's impossible from the outside to even determine whether he is actually breaking this law, removing the probable cause for an investigation in the first place. As far as I'm aware, Germany does not - and wouldn't have the resources anyway - to thoroughly investigate every foreign-hosted website to determine whether its owner is actually based in Germany and is thus breaking the law by not publishing an "impressum".
Interestingly, you only have to do it IF you have an online presence. As in, you don't have to have an online presence when running a business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Justice_Project#WJP_Rule...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRn4xzaugbk [1] nor for long :(
https://www.reuters.com/article/swisscom-court-idUSFWN20M0KT
The problem is that we're the only ones with standing to challenge the Hamburg injunction, so if we don't, they can use it against anyone in the EU.
You probably could ask EFF for help in this case.
This Hamburg court in particular has produced hundreds of scandalous injunctions over the years, many of which were overturned later.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
vs
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
"The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made case law, and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions."
And civil law systems are not all tuned the same way.
Well that's the problem right there. Some times the laws are stupid or out of date so you end up getting screwed by some unscrupulous megacorp willing to abuse said outdated laws.
Sure, the right sollution is to change the laws but you're in court right NOW and the process of changing laws is slow and the lawmakers heavily influenced by lobbyists and powerful interest groups to resist changes that affect them.
And the common law system has also many shortcomings, especially when judges are basically political appointees.
But media megacorps have never cared about logic or sanity. They make their own reality with their piles of money and lawyers.
Or maybe 9.9.9.9 (quad9)! :)
But in the end, this means that people will start using the alternatives more.... hopefully.
OR, these governments should have a formal enforcement regime that monitors and sends takedown requests to DNS resolvers.
Then, high-tech people will either use .onion, or we will see again the popularity of alt-root DNS services.
So will the alt-root DNS website (whose domain is on the "official" root) be taken down, because it is a pointer to a pointer to potentially illegal stuff?
Where does it end? Or will the goal be simply to make it hard enough that only 1% of people know how to access it, vs. 20%?
So the only people left are the ones mining coins and skirting KYC/AML laws and I think that leads to a scenario where they'll gain a reputation of being a "nefarious" technology even though there's _some_ merit in the idea.
DNS based censorship by western countries is a risky game IMO. That makes the system vulnerable to a developing country coming in, setting up alternate DNS roots, and refusing to filter / censor for copyright infringement. It won't take much for western users to learn they need to use a foreign search engine to find things the western countries want censored.
China's citizens will be using US search engines and US citizens will be using Chinese search engines. Lol.
Yeah I don't know why any of these blockchain DNS systems don't have an easy fiat on-ramp. Most people don't care about holding a token, they just want their domain name. It's fairly easy these days too with all the stablecoins around.
The thing is I wanted a brandable name that I could likely get for less than $.50, but I'd be willing to pay $50 via credit card to avoid dealing with HNS. I would literally pay 100x the market rate to avoid dealing with their crypto currency because, by the time I deal with the bookkeeping and taxes of a crypto purchase, it costs me more than $50 in time and effort.
I definitely do NOT want the token/coin. As soon as I touch it the transaction becomes a taxable event for me. It's a nightmare. Imagine if every store in your city used a different foreign currency and the government made you track every transaction you make so you can report your foreign currency gains/losses on your taxes.
I imagine it will become easier to buy with checkouts that can take a credit card. It looks like some already have a Stripe checkout workflow.
One thing that is easier about owning a domain as an NFT is that it's not a subscription; you pay once and own it until you want to transfer it to someone else.
Or, to put it another way, the MPAA is attacking discovery not hosting. Which I think is pretty smart - its good bang for the buck. The people who have legit binaries to share can do so pretty easily (e.g. torrent a linux distro). It would step over the line if they tried to, I don't know, outlaw the bittorrent protocol. But taking down freemoviesXXX.com doesn't exactly raise my hackles.
I'd much rather have that then companies suing some kid who downloaded a torrent.
If they sued the kids downloading this shit they'd be demolished by society.
This way they get what they want and we pay the cost because nobody cares enough.
This creates both a concept of there being a censorship list one can be added to and incentivizes escalating attempts to control what can be viewed.
DNS is extremely easy to bypass which is really only half the problem. The other half is the complexity of bypassing blocking can trivially be outsourced to devs of sharing apps who can both implement search and DNS or even vpn.
Technical barriers that are basically boxes for clients to tick are entirely useless your citizens may manage limited complexity budgets but they can outsource those to developers.
The logical path this leads you to are technical and restrictions on what content applications are allowed to display, what applications one is allowed to install based on their compliance with point one, restrictions on what OS one is allowed to install based on compliance with point two.
Then you can control ability to access network resources based on compliance with point three.
This was all speced out decades ago and the technology embedded in your motherboard and somewhat in play on mobile platforms.
Once you have this you will actually have effective censorship tools and now have to worry about how they might be misused when previously we might be reassured by our ability to bypass censorship at need.
When you come down to it the entire content producing industry is of only modest value compared to say science and technology and has more resources than it's ever had before and freemoviesxxx.com is little actual threat to it's existence. It mostly prevents useless people without a creative bone in their body who have never contributed to society in any fashion from maximizing their revenue sufficient to afford a second yacht.
Twisting consumer tech the necessary gateway for all modern communication and culture to increase their revenue slightly is the tail wagging the dog.
Any attempt to take one step down the road ought to result in the offenders being nuked from orbit because their entire destruction would be better end result for society than their success.
I'm just saying, taking down the DNS entry for "obviously" criminal domains doesn't bother me. And yes, when it's not obvious, or worse, is maliciously abused by power to silence dissent, then yes, it's worth being upset about. The slippery slope fallacy is all about extrapolating how power could be abused, leaving the only response to take away power entirely. But that's impossible, because power exists. So let's have an adult conversation about how to use it for the good of all.
That is essentially saying that nothing is bad enough to warrant being taken down ever.
People shouldn't have to tour every possible jurisdiction on earth to have something taken down in the jurisdiction they live in.
Yes, they should. Or they can save a lot of effort and just block it locally.
One sovereign people shouldn't be prevented by another sovereign people from conducting their lives as they see fit. Global rules are incompatible with respecting the vast diversity of humans on this planet.
Hopefully, 9.9.9.9 can apply this ruling specifically to German CIDRs and be done with it.
That's essentially the purpose of DNS bans. They are enforced by a given jurisdiction, but they let you solve the root problem rather than running around host providers in foreign jurisdictions.
For example, on October 15th of this year all Tor addresses from the last 15 years of Tor v2 will stop being supported and will vanish into thin air.
I run an email forwarding[0] app and I need to do a lot of DNS query(for spam filtering purpose), I run dnsmasq top load balance between CloudFlare, OpenDNS, GoogleDNS, Quad9 and Hetzner DNS. Quad9 outperform the rest with 2-4x faster and more reliable. In term of reliable I meant they won't rate limit me.
If anyone need reliable DNS, Quad9 rocks it. I'll contribute my part on this battle too.
Thanks Quad9
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I like this dig at Sony. I don't believe for a second that Sony has any interest of the artists in mind. It's all about their own profits at all cost. They wouldn't care in the slightest if artists died of hunger. But that's just my opinion from dealing with the record labels myself.
If people would watch it, they would pay homeless people to dance and fight each other in LA's canals during a storm, monetize it, advertise it on all platforms, and they would still sleep OK at night.
But they are, nonetheless, the ones paying the artists. Not nearly enough, and with plenty of shenanigans, but that doesn't change the fact that every movie ends with a long, long, long list of people who got paid for working on it -- by Sony.
It's disingenuous for Sony to pretend they care about anything other than their own profits. It's just tugging at heartstrings. Few of them actually get a share of the profits. They work for a paycheck.
But they've nonetheless got a point: they hire artists, lots of 'em. Some of their profits go into making the next movie.
Arguably, that's better than caring about them. I don't particularly like facile capitalist arguments, but Adam Smith's quote about the baker really does apply here: the artists don't need Sony to care, they just need Sony to pursue its own self interest because it happens to also profit them.
You won't see me crying over Sony's lost profits, and I'd love for more people to see movies other than studio blockbusters. But I know a lot of people who make movies and they do, in fact, get their paychecks and royalty checks from Sony.
I could see some people equating Quad9 to a CDN but that is not the same. CDN's require the offender to set up an account and manually point the CDN to their site after accepting an acceptable use policy. An open DNS server requires no setup by the offender and no AUP. Anyone can point their client to the open DNS servers and request any domain.
(I got this by doing reverse dns lookups on some of the IPs they list without censoring)
Edit: I have tried resolving using 9.9.9.9 and get the same answer as other DNS servers, even running from a VPS in Germany. It appears they have not blocked it yet?
As for .to, it does resolve fine for me via 9.9.9.9 from multiple locations including Germany but maybe my VPS IP just doesn't resolve to the right geolocation.
Edit: Resolves in Versatel (which is a business-grade connection). The offending domain is blocked by 1&1's (Versatel's parent) DNS resolvers though.
This is the kind of shit that makes me reconsider returning to piracy.
- John Gilmore
It's so bizarre how the left controls the house, the presidency, academia, the mainstream media for the most part, all of the big tech companies, but complain that the Republicans are the fascists.
We either have free speech, or we have fascism. And it's not the right trying to censor and cancel people, it's the authoritarian left who feel like they know better than everyone else. Very irritating as a libleft, because they read my disagreement as being right leaning rather than freedom loving.
It's not a left right issue, we do need to have sex-ed in schools, you need to talk about homosexuality, and the problem with nationalism even the american flavour. I don't even think those are issues that all left leaning people agree on. Dig deeper.
Just as if logic was working. Last time I checked from the Smithsonian woke bullshit, logic itself is racist... Oh well.
> we do need to have sex-ed in schools, you need to talk about homosexuality
Over my dead body. My children will not hear about any trans / Kinsey reports bullshit, or even CRT clusterfuck for that matter.
I have tried. It simply doesn't work. Proudly censorious authoritarian leftists. They see themselves as the good guys saving the world, and if that means free speech has to go, then so be it.
I'm reminded of this quote:
>“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Are you sure about that?
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/parler-banning-leftist/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/conservatives-love-c...
You can invent whatever moralizing obligation you want, but I don’t think it’s reasonable expect an organized effort from the {$outgroup} community to defend the rights rights of the people who designated them the outgroup.
> People are disinclined to support your rights if they see you as advocating against theirs.
By that argument, the Libertarians would be loved by everybody, but they aren't, because it's no longer a discussion on ethics, it's a fight over holly dogma. The ACLU will no longer support people on the Right in the name of Free Speech. Lines in the sand have been dug by the left, and they no longer crosses them. The right, (ie. the MSM's fascist) however do it all the time because they are the most open ones. If you are a gay 1sh amendment absolutist, you aren't gay, you're just a nazi. The ancients Greeks are no longer the bases of our culture/civilization, they're esclavagist.
This is false[0]. After that, we appear to be getting into Godwin's law territory, so I'm gonna leave it alone.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
The ACLU actively advertised in the Kavanaugh nomination.
Then an ACLU trans lawyer stated: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
Then in 2018 they covertly backed Stacey Abrams (democrat).
Then an ACLU editor wishes death on a republican senator.
and so on... The ACLU has very much been gangrened by the marxist.
The countless analogies don't really help me to find the right approach to handle these kinds of things.
First, the "it only increases friction" argument: Basically everything is like that. Barely anything is absolute in the regard. If locked doors are effective at stopping most get-ins, it doesn't matter that they can easily be opened with a bit of skill.
Second, should every country have to accept everything that is legal to host in any other country, i.e., should countries be allowed to make and uphold their own laws? I mostly think so, but am not sure how to achieve this. Violations can easily be outside of the reach of the country but there is still a desire to prevent the influence. Is DNS resolution an appropriate point to attack this problem? I am not sure, neither from an effectiveness nor an sensibility point of view, but I find the point of view to pursue everyone in their home jurisdiction (if it can be determined at all) convincing either.
Isn't that backward? The question is, should people be free to make their own choices and live their own lives? I don't care about countries, I care about people.
I do care about countries as a governing body for the society that creates it, as I think societies should be allowed to self govern. Further, as I am not an anarchist, I believe that laws and governments are a valid way to do so.
It is, however, debatable (even for me) which laws are "okay" for a society to implement on itself. There are laws I would consider fundamentally unacceptable. A mostly uncontroversial example would be slavery.
I think that's a philosophical debate, but mostly nonsense in practicality. It's not a matter of belief or opinion, for the most part; it's not hard to understand. It's just trendy for authoritarians to attack human rights as some subjective matter of relativistic ideas - that would be convenient for them.
> societies should be allowed to self govern
People have a right to self-govern, and to protect that right and others, 'governments are instituted among humans'. The word 'society' is often a construct used by the powerful to justify their control of the weak - the powerful are 'society', they assert, kind of like old-fashioned divine appointment.
But more to the point, although the Swiss courts will happily tell Hamburg to get stuffed, that would leave the precedent standing, for application against literally anyone in the EU.
Can we use this precedent to sue the US government in court for using DNS to kill Yemenis (drones run software like libc, libc uses DNS), or perhaps to sue Kellogg's for making breakfast cereal that was eaten by someone on the morning they decided to kill someone?
Disclaimer: I know one of the principals, for whom I have a lot of respect
https://www.reuters.com/article/swisscom-court-idUSFWN20M0KT
We'll see what happens.
They sure can! It's just one of the many "perks" of the EU.
While finding a legal solution, the resolvers could mark if a block was done due to a legal reason (ie. censorship), so that clients can react to that and ask another resolver instead. If enough resolvers would adhere to this practice, it would render these censorship attempts useless. Of course, client software would need to support this too.
I haven't talked to the team yet here at https://safing.io/, but I think we'd be willing to implement that in our DNS client.
https://quad9.net/service/privacy
"Quad9 commits to obey the law in any country in which it operates. Therefore, it will only operate in countries with a rule of law compatible with Quad9's ethics and moral duty to protect users. If a government were to use national law to attempt to force Quad9 to act in a way that would harm users (such as collecting information that might de-anonymize an at-risk individual), Quad9 would withdraw from operations in that country. This does not mean users within that country would be prevented from using the Quad9 service (unless the country itself prevented them); the service will operate from locations in nearby countries."
This isn't a case of caving to the lawyers. Those lawyers got a JUDGE to grant an INJUCTION. Once that happens, you're not caving to lawyers - you're going to follow the letter of that injunction while you appeal it, or throw up your hands and follow it forever.
Also FTA: "We have retained counsel, and we are in the process of filing an objection to the injunction, though we are required to comply with it."
So they're not throwing their hands up...
--edited for spacing
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair
The prevailing filter bubble of the bourgeoisie and the rich is intent on remaining secure at all costs, assassinations included. Just look around the world where journalists are murdered most and then where they are deplatformed.
Sorry, I totally agree with you but people have learned that anyone using words like bourgeoisie shouldn't be listened to.
2. You can't cure agendas, ignorance, or hate with a politically-correct dictionary.
3. You have no sense of humor. :)
I genuinely don’t understand what kind of reaction you think “everyone knows”. That some people will be inexplicably scared when the the name of Karl Marx is invoked?
- "middle- and upper-classes taken together"
- "people earning over $80k unless they're filing jointly or have 3+ kids"
- "let all the shallow people against the poor reveal their true colors if they really want to jump to conclusions"
Don't see anywhere I agued it wasn't, but I was responding to your comment which sounded like Quad9 was caving to Sony's lawyers, as opposed to the more specific accusations of judicial bribery in this follow-up post.
Is it common for German judges to be bought and/or specific judgements to be paid for in Germany?
None of the other options you listed come as close to describing what was stated as bribery does.
We'll see what happens once the dust settles.
It appears that they are technically unable to comply with the injunction.
Technically, this block does not stop anyone from getting the IP address for a domain. Anyone can resolve a domain name using public information that is disseminated from domain name registries, domain name registrars and other authoritative DNS providers. Quad9 is just a third party DNS provider, not an authoritative source for IP addresses. In theory, third party DNS providers could refuse to provide (resolve) the IP address for any domain name. They could do this on their own accord, to suit their own interests, or at the behest of anyone, e.g., an end user, a financial contributor (donor), an interested corporate partner, or perhaps pursuant to a court-ordered injunction.
In fact, this in exactly what Quad9 does: they block domains. They advertise this capability on their website, where even the most non-techical reader could find it. From the "About" page:
"Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting to malware or phishing sites."
Third party DNS has a number of potential problems; filtering is one. Funny how people have literaly turned that problem into a selling point. For example, OpenDNS, now part of Cisco, started a business doing DNS-based filtering.
Personally I fail to see why third party DNS (ISP-provided DNS or so-called "open resolvers") remains a preferred method of retrieving IP addresses or other RRs. IMO, there is no technical advantange anymore.
Many years ago I wrote a system for resolving domains without using recursion, using only authoritative queries, never setting the RD bit. It was very fast. Faster than a cold cache, IME. It could actually get faster as it acquires more addresses of authoritative servers, because it does not need to look them up again. It "learns". The best aspect though is that there are no unecessary third party middlemen. Third party DNS providers are not authoritative sources for any RR. They are middlemen. They do not operate for free. They are potentially subject to influence from whomever pays the bills.
People often discuss "privacy" when they discuss third party DNS service. IMO, using a shared third party DNS cache seems antithetical to "privacy" (not to mention "security"). In any event, it enables filtering by someone who is not an authority for the DNS data they are serving, a middleman. This is the view of an end user, not a corporation nor a developer working for one.
So, have you tired resolving a domain on a high-latency connection? Or live in an area where the internet routing don't make sense but you don't have a choice (or worse, you have a choice to different ISPs who all have different weird routing)? Not everyone has a good connection, and this is doubly true for residential connections. In those cases, "smart" DNS providers can steer the users to the fastest route, which in some cases resolves to a better server than the answer given to when a user does a direct recursive answer (because the authoritative servers directs the user into a "bumpy" routing). That's the (original) selling point of 1.1.1.1: they will use Cloudflare's knowledge of your routing to give you a better server (even if the domain you're asking for is not from Cloudflare's network).
I store the RRs permanently in a custom zone files once I retrieve them. Then query the data from a loopback-bound authoritative DNS server. No subsequent queries for those RRs leave the network interface. This is faster than 1.1.1.1 .
Here's a real-life example I encountered: Wikimedia (which operates Wikipedia et al.) has historically routed Japanese connections to Singapore, where they're geographically close, but due to how the internet backbone in the area works (it goes via Hong Kong, where switching time adds up to the latency) it made more sense to route them to WM's Los Angeles servers (and some ISPs have done this before WM has formally rerouted it to Los Angeles).
Or even a more frustrating one: I have routed SingTel users to Hong Kong despite also operating a server to Singapore because their routing is so bonkers that SingTel will route the connection to America and back just so they can access a server that they can physically go by using the metro (yes, I have contacted their NOC. No, they haven't changed anything).
Will this break DNSSEC? Absolutely. Will ordinary users care? While I'll care about correctness, more users will care about the speed and quality of their connection rather than correctly routing to a suboptimal server.
I should clarify what I meant by "there is no technical advantage anymore". There was a time when "personal" computers and internet were so slow, users could not be expected to do their own lookups. No one could be expected to run "BIND" on their own computer. Running something like Unbound, "Pi-hole" (dnsmasq) or countless other options was not feasible like it is today. A shared DNS cache run by a third party made sense. What I am suggesting is those days have passed. One of the authors of the popular O'Reilly books on DNS, a so-called "DNS expert" that most DNS administrators followed back in the early days, more or less admitted this many years ago. Technically, no one needs DNS "nannies" anymore. Users have the ability to exercise some manual control, if they so choose. I do my own DNS-based blocking.
Anyway, that's how I see it. One person's opinion.
Back in the day, you were often limited to one or two widely known public servers (MCI's for example) or your ISPs. Today I have tons of providers of public DNS, all with different advantages and tradeoffs, including paid features and support. This alone is radically better than the choices we had ~20 years ago.
Add to that the fact that I can run my own caching resolver without reading a 642 page paper bound book (see pihole vs a dog-eared copy of DNS and BIND by Liu and and Albitz), and we're far from the dystopian nightmare you seem to be referring to.
I have a found memory for the days when you could still use ns.sun.com (192.9.9.3) as a recursive resolver as it was such an easy to remember IP (for those days anyway).
The end result was a DMCA takedown often resulted in an indirect "Certified by Sony" link to non-fake infringing copies.
Given enough time, we'll eventually see a case where a studio's master copy gets corrupted, backups are out of date, and the studio does its best by replacing a master with a high quality infringing copy.
Edit: whoops, I thought Quad9 was an ISP.
Additionally, Cloudflare has previously shown commitment to deliver DNS exactly as it receives it with no changes (see archive.me debacle).
None of us will be traveling to Germany until this is settled.
Sir, I interpret your words as what I stated above - you will comply as required by law and fight the injunction as invalid. If you have another meaning, please clarify.
For now, there's the filing of objection in the Hamburg court, then the appeal to a superior court... There are many steps here, and the first have barely been taken.
Maybe because both have a DMCA process in place and don’t see the need fighting in the courts?
That won't help much if they're brought before EU courts.
The reason Google doesn't get brought to courts like that is because they already comply with rights owners.
Not familiar with German law. What would happen if they simply ignored the injunction?
In this case, Quad9 is being compelled by a court, with the force of law, to do so.
GoDaddy and Google will yank your entire domain if enough anonymous communists complain on Twitter that your content is undesirable.