Quad9’s Opinion of the Recent Court Ruling in Leipzig
quad9.net
quad9.net
> Being a small, non-profit organization, litigation has put a financial and operational strain on Quad9 as they continue funding its defense. They ask that anyone capable and inclined consider donating to maintain the foundation of a free and open Internet. Quad9 relies on donations and grants to continue providing cybersecurity and privacy services to our users.
https://quad9.net/donate (Paypal, Bank Transfer)
https://www.quad9.net/about/sponsors/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_Clearing_House
https://support.quad9.net/hc/en-us/articles/4422044032781-Qu...
https://www.quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-and-your-data/
May you elaborate what you imply by "with the analytics behind it"?
> The case centers around Sony Music’s demand that Quad9’s servers located in Germany stop resolving DNS names of third-party sites which are claimed to have URLs that contain copyright infringements.
In many other EU countries DNS-based blocking of various piracy sites is just standard procedure by ISPs, so courts aren't even asked.
In Germany there are very few sites which are actually blocked, and usually just for single ISPs because every single one requires a specific court order.
Last week I was in the Netherlands and found that multiple sites which work perfectly at home in Germany were blocked by the Dutch ISP.
A few of the biggest torrent sites are blocked, along with some proxies. That’s it. It still requires a court order. The only difference is that there’s a covenant that requires BREIN (sort of an off-brand RIAA) to only sue big providers for a site block and in a round robin fashion, and in return the ISPs agree to implement the block in aggregate if the court case is lost.
And unlike Germany, we don’t get sued for hundreds to thousands of euros for downloading a single file. Only extreme sharers are warned and later on sued.
Not that things aren’t stupid here. We used to have a ruling where we paid a “thuiskopieheffing” (“home copy levy”) of a few % on any digital storage, including devices. In trade, you were legally allowed to download anything, so long as it was for private use only.
A few years back that exception got nullified, but somehow the levy stayed.
> German court decisions are normally limited to Germany, which is why Quad9 has implemented geoIP on its infrastructure in Germany to prevent the domain names in question to be resolved for users querying from Germany. However, there are loopholes, such as VPNs, beyond Quad9’s control. The court deemed this not to be sufficient. The court’s decision ignored the VPN concept and implies that Quad9 must block these domains regardless of how users reach them or from what nation those intentionally disguised queries originate. Quad9 believes this is an exceptionally dangerous precedent that could lead to future global-reaching commercialized and political censorship if DNS blocking is applied globally without geographic limitations to certain jurisdictions.[1]
Also no, no EU ISP blocks sites without specific orders from government bodies. In my country the government ban list is public, with explanations given for each site, and every ISP must enforce it.
Also, it's much more difficult to enforce light copyright infringements for personal use in other EU countries compared to how easy and often corporations do it in Germany willy-nilly. No other EU country fines you hundreds to thousands of Euros for downloading a mp3/mkv. That's just preposterous.
And in Germany there is no "government ban list" at all. Which was exactly my point: You made it sound like Germany was worse than other EU countries, but the opposite is currently true: Many other EU countries have public ban lists which ISPs are required to follow with no courts involved. Germany doesn't.
Jeepers, I had no idea that it was this common for piracy sites to be blocked :/. Here in South Africa, I haven't had issues with torrents since uncapped ADSL became common, nor any piracy sites blocked.
I don’t know anything about this though.
Are there any German lawyers here who can comment on the spirit of German legal philosophy in the courts?
I sued to recover the costs and the case got assigned to a high profile judge in the city (don't ask me why, as again we are talking about a few thousand euros), who dismissed the case with, I quote "I also sold a house as part of a community of heirs and we had everything in order and it still took several months, you should have expected this". Completely ignored proof that they lied (in writing) to make me sign the contract and that it took them more than several months just to start the process that then took several months to complete
Then usually after signing that you can get the mortgage (at the very least it is much easier if bank gets the papers showing you're in progress of buying home).
After you sign the final deal, you pay and you are then written down (and bank, if you buy with mortgage) into land and mortgage register (which in my language is just called "perpetual book", funnily enough).
There is a bit more complexity when buying some old stuff that might not have entry in the registry, like my grand-grandfather house only have some documents for getting land from government after war and then them giving it to grandchildren few decades ago
Same procedure in Italy with the difference that there is no mandated amount. Of course the higher it is the less likely is that the seller backs out of the deal.
> they lied (in writing) to make me sign the contract
Lying in order to cause someone else to do something they wouldn't otherwise do is fraud.
Apparently, in this town it's common practice to say, "X is already done" when X hasn't yet been started -- even the judge does it! But it's the town and its standards which are screwed up, not the guy who expected to be told the truth.
(This is all accepting his description of the situation prima facae, of course.)
They needed a total of 30 documents and they said they had 28 of them, with the 2 remaining being non-critical and needed just to cover all bases. I analyzed the risks based on this information and acted accordingly with 2 things: one was signing the contract at the notary and the second was taking a bank loan.
The contract was signed with the official representative of the community of heirs and would go into effect after all other heirs have signed it, which was supposed to happen within 2 weeks. After 2 weeks I found out that not all heirs had their inhertiance papers (think 22 of 30 documents actually available) and one of those went no-contact because he had the smallest part and decided the effort isn't worth the money.
After 6 months, since the contract wasn't in effect, I haven't accessed the money from the bank, so the bank started issuing a fine (as per the contract I signed with them) of about 1000 Euros monthly (it's called Bereitstellungsprovision), which went for some months until they got their shit together.
Had I known that they didn't have all documents ready, I would not have entered the contract. Or I could have negotiated with the bank for a longer period to access the money.
Perhaps a more experienced buyer would have added some penalty clause to hedge against the idle money issue (banks don't like a delay between money availability and purchase of the collateral, that's a common issue I think), but since the problem is (was, I hope?) that the contract itself did not happen in time that surely wouldn't be easy (some multi-stage monstrosity, ouch). Unless they lied to get some advantage it can't really be fraud. (and what advantage would it be anyways? If the market price rose during the delay the sellers might even suffer a bigger net loss than that bank penalty ... I guess that would be a way it could become fraud, if they then suddenly refused signing, to sell to a higher bidder, abusing the delay for a safe market bet)
I suspect that this entire class of issues is a common pitfall people who routinely deal with real estate are well aware of, one of the risks kept in check by experience and taking the occasional blow.
I can only speculate as to why they did it, but I am pretty sure that it was to get the whole process started because some of the heirs were in poor health and they needed to sign the contract sooner rather than later, otherwise they would have entered in a potential loop of heirs dying and having to find the heirs of the heir and so on. So they said, let's start this thing now to minimize that risk and work on the rest of the documents later. From this point of view, they were right, as two people died in the months that followed.
I am also sure that they've hidden the fact because they knew that in this situation, it would have been nearly impossible to find a buyer willing to take part in the risk.
You are right with your remarks about experienced buyers. All in all, I have almost 0 regrets about the whole thing, I learned a lot of stuff in the meantime and got the house eventually
They already gained something - the sale of the property.
> knew that the remaining coinheritors would block
This doesn't matter - they said it was done. This was incorrect. It was fraud...
yet accusation of fraud is not an assumption?
More to the point, even if you want to call it an assumption a median lawsuit is a lot more thorough than something a commenter guesses offhand as they post. The two are leagues apart whether or not you use the same word.
I find the attitude in another countries tend to be a bit more reflective and open to criticism - here, everything is the way it is, because.. it is?
Like wtf, how can the powerhouse of Europe be so thick?
German written law tries to be all-encompassing, which tends to make it fairly contorted and hopelessly vague. German judges are often surprisingly young and inexperienced, since they get on the judge career track straight out of university (rather than being appointed after decades in legal practice). German courts at all levels seem to do an awful lot of pontificating, rather than striving to apply the law to the facts. Despite this, court decisions tend to be brief, and do not generally explain the judges' reasoning in any great detail. They are also not binding precedent, so the actual state of the law at any given time can be harder to discern.
The net effect was of a system that felt somewhat arbitrary, with broad-ranging but unexplained decisions made by relatively inexperienced people, often well outside any area with which they could reasonably be expected to be familiar. In general, there was much less legal certainty than I would be comfortable with.
I should note that these are fairly fine-grained critiques; it's important to keep them in context. There are far more capricious legal systems out there than this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Germany#Comparative_law
Notable disagreements exist as well, for example the Landgericht Berlin who routinely ignores even Supreme Court judgements [1], or the Landgericht Hamburg which is infamous for happily providing c&d orders to a degree other Landgerichte do not [2].
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/lg-berlin-geruegt-von...
[2] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2016/05/18/das-hamburger-mon...
In contrast, the respect for precedents results in a system that's not "derived from first principles". It has a certain elegance because you have a book where the law is written and you can just follow. It feels way more arbitrary and wrong to refer to some case years ago, undemocratic I would say and also inaccessible besides for the professionals who know how to find these. Not that you as an amateur should defend yourself but for small disputes you can still look at the law and ask someone more familiar to give you the right paragraphs before turning to a professional lawyer and a legal dispute.
Of course it has its own disadvantages and the laws get hugely complicated in effort to regulate everything.
Maybe because I've grown up here, but to me Common law feels "medieval" and I do not want to switch to a system where judges posses so much power. Ideally, in my POV, decisions should be almost algorithmic from a source of truth, comparable to computer code, specifying rules on how to arrive at results.
> The net effect was of a system that felt somewhat arbitrary, with broad-ranging but unexplained decisions made by relatively inexperienced people, often well outside any area with which they could reasonably be expected to be familiar. In general, there was much less legal certainty than I would be comfortable with.
Some perspective on this, since I know a judge. In germany, it is common to rotate the judges every few years to new positions (e.g. from traffic to financial cases). They get a refresher in the specific laws relevant for the area, but they also have a "group" they divide the cases with. The group also acts as professional support to each other so if there's uncertainty then there's always the colleagues.
This seems backwards to me. German law is supposed to be consistent with the constitution, so is, essentially, a logically consistent system. If you can prove a logical inconsistency with basic law, then you can win a case on that basis. That makes it more or less understandable, because the entire corpus of law follows logically from a short, comprehensible kernel.
Secondly, precedent is a pretty good guideline to what will actually happen.
Making precedent binding seems a bit crazy, to be honest, because if the precedent contains mistakes (which it inevitably does), then those mistakes become binding also, right? So logical inconsistency and contradiction is inevitably part of the common law system?
It is also not the correct institution to "make law" I think. It does not represent the population in some way as in a representative democracy should be. It was not debated in the parliament and it was not campaigned on. It is in some way a rule of experts.
This is typically the case in common law systems with a written constitution as well (the US, Australia, India, etc). Laws not consistent with the constitution generally get stuck down as invalid to the extent of any inconsistency.
In practice, of course, most day-to-day cases do not engage with constitutional principles in either system. If you're facing a criminal charge of larceny, and you're searching the Constitution / Basic Law for your defence, I might diplomatically call your approach... bold.
>> Secondly, precedent is a pretty good guideline to what will actually happen.
>> Making precedent binding seems a bit crazy, to be honest, because if the precedent contains mistakes (which it inevitably does), then those mistakes become binding also, right? So logical inconsistency and contradiction is inevitably part of the common law system?
This is a great question! Precedents can and are overturned in several ways in common law systems. A higher court can overturn a lower precedent, and generally also its own previous precedents. A lower court is more restricted, but perhaps the most common way to avoid a precedent is to "distinguish" it - this means to basically claim that the two cases are not alike, and so the precedent ought not apply. (Very loosely speaking, precedent is only binding on alike cases - this is the basic theory of precedent, that the case has already, in fact, been decided before. The Latin term you often hear for this is stare decisis.) This is tricky, and higher courts will rap lower courts on the knuckles if they're not obeying precedent that binds them without good cause.
But more broadly it's important to remember that precedent ("common law") is subordinate to written law ("statute law"). So if the legislature passes a law, and the judiciary interprets it in a way that the legislature doesn't like, the legislature is entirely free to amend that law to correct the court's understanding, which renders the precedent moot. The one exception is constitutional law, which might be more complicated to amend (referenda may be required), so courts have to tread carefully.
(None of the above is legal advice.)
I think there's a sort of principle here that differs: what makes a law legitimate? One reason why I don't like the idea of common law is that it entails that tradition should carry a legal weight, above and beyond what it already always practically does. This is why people accuse Burke of 'ancestor worship' - you take ordinary, fallible people that just had the luck of living and acting in the past, then you treat their decisions as bearers of a measure of inherent authority.
It might be a tolerable system if you were living in a society with a proud and morally upright history. That supposition is some of the impetus for Burke's defense of the idea of giving inherent ethical weight to tradition. I don't think any nation on earth qualifies, though.
Munich recently showed to be on the people's side.
And Leipzig apparently has some corrupt judges. How else can one explain this ruling if not corruption? Which is weird because people in Eastern Germany are more humane than those in western Germany. But apparently also more needy of money.
Who were the judges or was it just one judge and what was their/his/her history, that's what I'd find interesting.
For me this means, boycott Sony, which already lost my support with the trash TV from 2015. But screwing with our liberties on that level, I use quad9 as my default resolver, also because I like to read censored Russian media to have both sides' stories.
If I had the money I'd support quad9 in their struggle.
Also the audacity of the Leipzig court. The arrogance, unbelievable.
> Which is weird because people in Eastern Germany are more humane than those in western Germany. But apparently also more needy of money.
Also a weird statement to make
You're resolving it, you surely must know what's going on over there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
I have since never bought a Sony, although I really loved their products.
Here's geohot's brilliant reply:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
How this didn't warrant a corporate death sentence and major prison time for executives is a mystery to me.
Vote with your wallets. And let them know.
What a surprise that German courts run by boomer judges, who never used the internet before, ruled in favor of big media IP corporate interests with some bizzaro demands that don't make technical sense. Never seen that before. /s Cough, Axel-Springer, Cough
> German court decisions are normally limited to Germany, which is why Quad9 has implemented geoIP on its infrastructure in Germany to prevent the domain names in question to be resolved for users querying from Germany. However, there are loopholes, such as VPNs, beyond Quad9’s control. The court deemed this not to be sufficient. The court’s decision ignored the VPN concept and implies that Quad9 must block these domains regardless of how users reach them or from what nation those intentionally disguised queries originate. Quad9 believes this is an exceptionally dangerous precedent that could lead to future global-reaching commercialized and political censorship if DNS blocking is applied globally without geographic limitations to certain jurisdictions.
the question is, if something that is illegal in a country, may still be produced in the country if it is only offered outside of that country. this is certainly not clear-cut.