Quad9 wins appeal against Sony | Hacker News Reader

Quad9 wins appeal against Sony

quad9.net

310 pointsmadspindel54 comments

Haha, I enjoy that Quad9 brought up the domain name in question, playing into the Streisand effect. Maybe just a little bit out of spite from having caused them such a hassle. So today I learnt about https://canna.to. Thank you, Sony. It wouldn't have happened without you.

https://archive.is/https://canna.to/ for other germans

If you're wondering why you're getting a certificate warning for some cuii certificate, that's not a false positive but because your ISP is MITM'ing you "aus uheberrechteliche gruende"

Edit: that homepage has a link to an article that describes the issue https://archive.is/o/XemRZ/https://board.canna.tf/app.php/ca...

Related. Others?

Quad9 blocks pirate site globally after Sony demanded €10k fine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36878867 - July 2023 (65 comments)

Quad9’s Opinion of the Recent Court Ruling in Leipzig - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35971915 - May 2023 (84 comments)

DNS Resolver Quad9 Loses Global Pirate Site Blocking Case Against Sony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35081507 - March 2023 (11 comments)

Sony's Legal Attack on Quad9, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026403 - March 2023 (85 comments)

Avoid Using Quad9 DNS: They Are Going to Start Blocking Pirate Websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31487630 - May 2022 (7 comments)

DNS-Resolver Quad9 Loses First Pirate Site Blocking Appeal in Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29458069 - Dec 2021 (2 comments)

German Court Rules Against Internet Security Non-Profit Quad9 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29398455 - Nov 2021 (192 comments)

Quad9 Files Official Objection Opposing Sony Music’s German Court Ruling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28434883 - Sept 2021 (25 comments)

Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27620319 - June 2021 (227 comments)

So in the end, the only difference Sony made, for me, is that I now know about that website on the domain they tried to block.

Something... something... Streisand... something

The other difference is the domain names you will never know about because they wouldn't exist

In my opinion, the critical part here is that Sony directly tried to force Quad9 to block resolving the domain canna.to WITHOUT first trying to approach canna.to directly. The court points that out as:

"A blocking claim also does not exist because the plaintiff has not done enough to take legal action against the host provider of the disputed service."

I guess Sony is resorting to lawfare so that you won't pirate those shows they're taking off the Playstation Store.

Since the rootkit, I have always voted with my dollars in non-Sony directions.

What's the point? All corporations are the same. The multiplicity is a ruse.

I think the main moral of the story is not to base your company in Europe if you don't want to be subject to painful copyright litigation in German courts.

Which are not enforceable, as we can see. Living in Germany? Downloaded a torrent and sent 16KiB of that torrent back, got a letter from random lawyer to pay 350eur to somewhere? Not enforceable.

> Not enforceable.

I'm not familiar with how lawsuits work in Europe/European countrys, but in the US anyone can sue anyone for any reason at any time (with very specific, few restrictions).

If it's anything like the US, as long as it's not a completely spam/bogus lawsuit then it might not be enforcable but you still have to hire a lawyer and go through that painful process.

AND it sounds to me like Europe is similar to the US in that you may be sued by a state/country you don't reside in as long as you technically operate there (which everyone does now with the internet).

a) Law suit culture does not exist here, but yes you can, b) I'm truly speaking from experience... and a lot of people had that experience. You get a random useless letter from random useless agency that is making money from not lawsuits, but agreements from people who don't know they don't have to pay. It's a legalised scam kinda. Got a letter that you downloaded something sometime? Ignore. They want like 300-500eur to settle (it's not in court!). And they will not take it to court, because they instantly lose (and cover my costs of my lawyer) - they cannot actually prove *indeed you person* shared it, done. It's a business model of some shady (but legal) legal offices.

Couple of edits after reading the OPs comment again: - most of the countries in Europe do not have precedence law, - you do not NEED to hire a lawyer, most things are easy.

Does the loser always pay, or only if the judge rules the suit was frivolous? If it is always, that might cause the us not to have a lawsuit culture either.

In most cases the loser or a person who initiated the lawsuit pays. (If winner initiated, doesn't matter, if loser initiated, well they pay).

Well the courts decided pro quad9 so I think this is good news?

Or are you saying that in the US you can't be the subject to copyright lawsuits (Let alone DCMA takedown notices)?

Sony is now trying again in Italy :/

You absolutely can be subject to copyright lawsuits in the US. DMCA is also a US law. DCMA is the part of the US government that buys military parts from private companies :P

German courts decided in favor of Quad9 on appeal, but they still had to go through a shitton of litigation to get there, which is scary. I will also point out that Germany is the reason why the US went to life+70 terms in the 90s, since they had the longest terms in the EU. Disney was able to play the EU off the US to get an extra few decades on Mickey Mouse. However, that seems only scarcely related to this lawsuit. Even if copyright terms were only a few years, we'd still have idiot companies trying to take down notorious markets through any intermediary they can yell at. And civil litigation is a horribly drawn out slog in every country. So I'm not sure what ronsor is saying other than a generic "fuck the EU" here.

What a choice... painful copyright litigation in Europe, painful patent trolling in the US, or painful defenestration in Russia.

Now now, no self respecting data center has windows.

The consequence is due to the impact of the Lugano Convention 2007, as the piece mentioned.

So it is not just German courts, it is any court of an EU member state, plus those of Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Which is possibly the same mechanism whereby they're now subject to action in Italy.

Ruling (in English): https://www.quad9.net/uploads/URT_05_12_2023_en_Korr_MH_en2_...

> The court has also ruled that the case cannot be taken to a higher court and their decision is the final word in this particular case.

How can a non supreme court rule this? Why won't all courts just do this if its allowed?

It works differently in different countries. This is a German court, remember. I am German, but I am not a lawyer, so I am not what that means.

I too am very curious about that. I've never heard of such a legal principle -- can anyone knowledgeable point out what it's called? I'm curious for the justification behind it, as it seems so contrary to the generally accepted principles of how legal systems usually work.

As I understand it: In Germany, a court of appeal at that level will generally only allow a further appeal if general questions of law are concerned, according to its assessment. This is likely in order to protect the higher instances from being flooded with appeals on non-fundamental issues. As mentioned by TFA, there is still a procedure to object to such a decision, but it comes with higher hurdles for providing justification for objecting.

The procedure is called Nichtzulassungsbeschwerde in Germany, and is generally possible if the claim exceeds 20,000 EUR according to § 544 ZPO [1]. At the BGH (highest civil court), the success rate is surprisingly high, less than 5% rejections in 2022 [2]. After a successful Nichtzulassungsbeschwerde you still have to win the case, and only legal arguments will be considered by the court, i.e. you cannot enter facts not already discussed in the lower instance, introduce new witnesses etc.

[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/ZPO/544.html

[2] https://www.rak-bgh.de/statistik-und-materialien/

> After a successful Nichtzulassungsbeschwerde you still have to win the case, and only legal arguments will be considered by the court, i.e. you cannot enter facts not already discussed in the lower instance, introduce new witnesses etc.

Interesting.

Not only can anyone appeal all the way to the supreme court in the USA (they still have to decide to take it up however) but people can also file "cert" to have the case be skipped all the way to the supreme court to decide the "questions presented" or the supreme court can even invoke "original jurisdiction" and have the case be heard directly from the beginning (this one is a nuclear option tho so has limitations).

Of course, all the pros/cons apply with such a system.

Off to nolife wikipedia on how the european court systems work including what courts are higher than each countries courts etc.

I think people are surprised by the wording of it, but the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) is de-facto the same. The facts are taken as ruled in the lower courts. So unless there is a question regarding how the facts and the law interact, the SCOTUS don't really have jurisdiction in the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_St...

> The Supreme Court relies on the record assembled by lower courts for the facts of a case and deals solely with the question of how the law applies to the facts presented.

And later:

> The court grants a petition for cert only for "compelling reasons", spelled out in the court's Rule 10. Such reasons include:

> * Resolving a conflict in the interpretation of a federal law or a provision of the federal Constitution

> * Correcting an egregious departure from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings

> * Resolving an important question of federal law, or to expressly review a decision of a lower court that conflicts directly with a previous decision of the court.

Funnily enough, I was watching the Spotify series on Netflix, The Playlist, and saw Sony Music Group's fight with the Pirate Bay(which covers similar themes) before Spotify exploded on to the scene. This was a real event too covered in the early episodes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial

Offtopic, I now realize why they're called Quad9, and I wonder if they got the IP first then came up with the name or how it went?

> DNS (Domain Name Service) is a foundational element of internet infrastructure, matching IP addresses with domain names. The name “Quad9” is a reference to the IP address used by the service, which is 9.9.9.9.

> “IBM has owned the 9.0.0.0/8 address block since the 1980s,” Paul Griswold, director of Strategy & Product Management at IBM X-Force, told eWEEK. “We were saving 9.9.9.9 for the right project, and the value Quad9 is going to bring to the public is just such a project. We have not used it for any commercial service in the past.”

https://www.eweek.com/security/quad9-dns-service-debuts-to-h...

And I'm pretty sure they chose to use 9.9.9.9 after Google made it's public DNS available at 8.8.8.8 (and I'd bet Cloudflare chose 1.1.1.1 for the same reason)

Data over pure DNS is trivial. A simple demo site for anyone to try it out. https://dnskv.com $ dig txt quad9.dnskv.com

That's like going after the telephone book publishers for providing the number of the escort service.

Excellent news indeed

Yet another thing irrelevant to me by spending 2 hours learning BIND and spinning up my own resolver... :)

Tangential, but why are people so terrible at redaction? The PDF at https://quad9.net/uploads/URT_05_12_2023_en_Korr_MH_en2_2e62... literally just drew black boxes over text that's still copyable :(

Which was helpful for me to learn that all of this was about a freaking Evanescence album and not even the album with that one hit song but one from 2021. I cannot believe all of this was over an album that has under 100m streams on Spotify. What a waste of money for everyone involved.

Evanescence is really the hill Sony Music wants to die on. Wow.

IANAL but IIRC If you don’t enforce your own copyright then it can set a precedent for you not having the protection of a copyright.

You're thinking of trademarks.

Most people simply have no interest in PDF primitives, and rightly so. If you're a lawyer, it's not supposed to be your job to be an expert in PDF's underlying information structure.

Every PDF editor ought to have a big flashing warning explaining to use a redaction tool instead, every time a user attempts to draw/move a black rectangle over text, or "highlight" text black.

This is a crystal-clear case where it's not the users being dumb -- it's the technology failing the users.

Counterpoint: "that should do the trick" is good enough for most people, but not for lawyers.

I disagree. Yes, they don't have to know how to program a PDF redaction tool, but they should certainly be proficient in using one. One of the functions of a lawyer is deciding what information another party doesn't need to know, and if they leak it in such a way, that's definitely a failure on their part, even if the software should have been more clear.

Of course it's their responsibility in the end. But they only have to worry about it in the first place due to the bad usability of the software.

My point still stands: it's not about users being terrible. It's about the software design being bad. Software should always be designed to suit humans, not vice-versa.

...and that includes human lawyers, too.

Adobe Acrobat actually does pop up if you try to add a black highlight and asks if you meant to redact instead, but then you can't actually use the redact tool unless you pay for Acrobat Pro.

> ... black boxes over text that's still copyable

I didn't even need to copy it. I was reading through it and as my cursor glided over one redaction, it turned into a pointer finger and displayed the URL underneath it in the bottom of my browser.

Edit: Just tested it, and I could click right through to the redacted website directly from this PDF.

Because technology (and reality) is deep. Human comprehension is a shallow collection of approximations and simplifications - albeit in different areas for different people, but the point is that no one mind is capable of understanding everything anymore. Changing the background color to black looks like redaction, it would be redaction if it were printed out, the average consumer of documents has no idea about the details of ObjStm layering and text selection ordering in a PDF.

Considering it was uploaded by Quad9, who did not want to block these websites, perhaps the ineffective redaction was an "accident."

This is the one redeeming argument I know for printing out PDFs, redacting them, and scanning them again.

To be honest, I also wouldn't be 100% confident in my own abilities to properly redact a PDF in any other way! (Maybe by going through a PNG, which saves some paper but otherwise still breaks everything else that printing and scanning would break too.)

You just need to print it out and rescan it with _redacted.pdf added to the name. Solved

Hi - the guy who wrote the blog speaking here - I'm the General Manager for Quad9. You're right - this was done by the team a bit too hastily. However, the document is public as a court filing, try to be as cautious as possible with people's names in online filings. We wanted to keep the PDF as intact as possible so people could cut/paste other parts of it for reference without having to dig up the actual document from the courts, or having to do error-prone OCR work on a PNG.

Interestingly, one of the things I didn't need to see redacted was the name of the domain itself - we publish that in the blog post text. Previously, we'd blocked it out of previous documents in an abundance of caution so that we could not be accused of promotion of the site by an obtuse mis-reading of intention. Everyone here has been working nonstop on this case for a long time, and we'll try to fix this tomorrow after some sleep.

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