Sony's Legal Attack on Quad9, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech
quad9.net
quad9.net
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.
Don't underestimate these monopolists. My country regularly makes it to this list. I remember some MPAA asshole coming here to push his agenda being met by journalists asking him why this should be a priority in a country without universal basic sanitation. Now we have increasingly regular IP enforcement. One such operation made national news a few days ago.
https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/2022%20Notoriou...
This point is tremendous. The intention is outright censorship, and using among the most obvious ways possible. It means that a company, and then government and political entities, can force their will and censorship on all DNS resolvers for whatever reasons. It clearly won't stop at Quad9, but be used as a precedent, to exert near full control and censorship on the web as they see fit.
It's also a set up, for an obvious next stage, in which such companies and government entities will be able to force which DNS resolvers ISPs and users will be legally able to use in the future. Because if they win, they will then create measures to enforce compliance. That can mean, which DNS resolvers are used, because they are or are not compliant.
> ...does not solve this specific copyright violation claim.
The point of such companies and entities is to ignore user rights and to centralize their control, for their profits. This includes forcing their policies and politics anywhere on the planet.
They don't want to have to prove their case directly. Rather they wish to simply be able to make a claim or push that simply the possibility of copyright infringement is enough, so as to exert censorship on 3rd parties of limited resources who won't be able to fight back.
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.
One wonders if Quad9 has its own ulterior motive here, because none of the other DNS providers seem to care, and I find it difficult to believe Sony isn't trying to sue them too.
If anything maybe the reason Sony started with Quad9 is because Quad9 is already a censoring DNS resolver, since by design it censors malware domains, and Sony is saying "well then you should censor copyright infringement too."
Additionally, many DNS resolvers don't turn over records or anonymize. Which doesn't help such companies when they make a claim. These type of companies want the courts to help them to completely destroy the possibility of user privacy or any protection of rights, as it pertains to any claims that they might make. They want to be able to force 3rd parties and DNS resolvers to be compliant to their policies and profits.
Quad9 is special in that it's the only recursive resolver of any size that's not headquartered in the jurisdiction of the Northern District of California federal courts. All three others of the "big four" are, and Quad9 was until it moved to Switzerland so as to be bound by criminal privacy law, and to get out from under USG data-collection requirements.
But Quad9 is _not_ the only one being attacked by Sony. Sony has already won against Cloudflare in other venues, but that's a much easier target.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/italian-court-orders-...
https://dimitrology.com/cloudflare-wants-to-eliminate-moot-p...
Quad9 doesn't sell hosting services to pirate sites, so has no connection with the alleged infringers. Which is the point of all this. Quad9 is being attacked _because_ it has no relationship with infringing parties. If Sony can establish a precedent that Quad9 can be forced to censor, then that precedent is, in principle, applicable to all parties. Firewall manufacturers. Operating system publishers. Wifi hotspot manufacturers. Open-source software authors. Etc.
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=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
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.
In the short term, of course, donations to the legal defense fund always help:
https://www.quad9.net/news/blog/sony-s-legal-attack-on-quad9...
Thanks.
Fortunately, it provides a handy list of providers to use with your VPN. e.g. https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders
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.
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.
That already exists today with ISPs. Don't like it? Run your own internal resolver pointed at the root servers.
Any tutorials on how to do this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. .at domains are owned directly, the registrar is only a service provider handling the process.
I assume that for most other TLDs this will be different.
You could also use Quad9's unsecured DNS to check if it was blocked by their list or if something else was going on.
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.
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).
NB I have a slightly different setup - I run Unbound locally and route DNS requests through the 'suitable machine' on VPS over VPN established by my LAN router. I considered moving the resolver there but didn't yet found the setup what would be usable for me when I would be out of my LAN. Opening my resolver to the whole world is the way to be a part of the bot relays for DDoS attacks, so this is out of question.
Try dnscrypt-ip4-nofilter-pri
$ dog thepiratebay.org. a @9.9.9.9
A thepiratebay.org. 5m00s 162.159.137.6
A thepiratebay.org. 5m00s 162.159.136.6
$ dog eztv.re. a @9.9.9.9
A eztv.re. 5m00s 104.31.16.120
A eztv.re. 5m00s 104.31.16.9
$ dog yts.mx. a @9.9.9.9
A yts.mx. 5m00s 104.31.16.9
A yts.mx. 5m00s 104.31.16.120A 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.
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=34659768
Maybe Quad9 needs Pirate Bay's lawyers, if this isnt a subtle revenue generating exercise? https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-proxy-defeats-polices-gi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
The court location has specifically been chosen because of its friendliness towards copyright holders.
Sony is not being lazy or stupid here, but malicious.
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.
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.
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.
Demanding a general block-- "you can't deliver any mail from Bob Smith"-- would be overbroad and silly-- he might be shipping meth, but he also mailed his electric bill and Christmas cards, none of which contain meth.
Here, we have a very similar issue with DNS. The DNS provider can't meaningfully know the intent of a given query; the site in question could contain both pirated content and cat videos, and there is no way to know which is being requested.
I also can't imagine how you'd expect this to scale-- if one firm realizes they can demand one domain removed, it creates precedent where eventually every cloud service provider and ISP is buried under requests. Even assuming every one of those requests is 100% legitimate, good faith, and accurate, it's simply going to be an untenable task. Inevitably, it would go back to the courts because the finite resources of service providers can't keep up with the tsunami and something got through.
The only possible way to make the Copyright Brigade happy would be to switch to an allowlist model: only these domains explicitly blessed by the Almighty Sony are allowed to be routed.
That statement is false. DNS resolvers have nothing to do with piracy whatsoever nor are delivering any "goods". This is why the analogy of lashing out at 3rd parties is appropriate.
> They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site.
Right now, it must be proven in court that the site is "illegal" and infringement occurred by specific persons. Not just make a claim to initiate world wide DNS censorship, where a company foolishly thinks such will help increase their profits (as various studies show it doesn't help). This attempt at bullying DNS providers can lead to general censorship by powerful companies and then government entities, once they can get the legal precedent set.
If people are fuzzy about what's going on, The Hill also did a good story about this. https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/594718-german-court-c...
The attempt at stealth pushing censorship over the web, is to have sites blocked that might contain infringing content without proving that is so in court, first. They want to be able to bully DNS resolvers based on mere allegations without due process to censor whatever sites they tell them to. These companies don't want to have to prove specific cases of infringement in court, rather they are seeking to gain the general power to censor whoever and whatever they want by gaining the legal means to do it.
Free market and "benefit of the doubt here" because Sony...that's really something.