"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me, you’re typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.
Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market
> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.
DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.
While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated
Fair point. I'd say "We're neutral, unless you attack us, in which case we stop being neutral about you, in particular". I'd still use them if this were the policy.
Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.
That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.
The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).
Granted, that's the theory.
When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.
But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.
It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).
I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.
Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!
The line is drawn wherever a particular judge decides it's drawn, and each judge has a different ability to understand the broader implications of the line being drawn on any individual case.
Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?
To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.
Probably. They will want to do everything possible to be able to prove that they took all measures at their disposal to stop serving the French market on top of taking all measures to have their business operations be outside of French jurisdiction.
Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.
Various European countries are very good at that, starting from UK brexiting the EU, Germany shutting down all their nuclear power plants. Do not get started on accepting unlimited illegal immigration.
I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.
I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:
- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.
- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?
Seems unlikely to resolve their legal issues, as the French lawyers will use the same tactic as the German ones, using a VPN to access the services from France to justify continuing their lawsuits. Perhaps they should consider relocating out of Europe.
FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?
> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."
MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"
Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.
FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)
Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.
This. Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing. People need to realize that human knowledge is so vast now that such tools (which effectively perform data compression and interpolation) are absolutely necessary. I don't feel bad for copyright holders at all because copyright shouldn't probably exist at all.
The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.
Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)
I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?
Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.
Authors and artists have no basis for payment in the absence of copyright laws. Like, anything they make would be literally free to steal. Literally... 1700s? Late 1600s?
What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.
But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
> But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.
While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.
Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.
All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.
The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.
She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.
Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.
Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.
"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."
Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.
They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.
Love to see some Lavabit action in response to government overreach. (Not that it's fun to see a provider have to shut down operations in an area, but more that I prefer to see them sticking to their principles rather than showing the government that this behavior is tolerated.)
Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.
The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.
It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.
We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).
In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!
> We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver.
When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.
> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.
Back then most computing was done in office, lab, university settings. Running recursive resolvers for the local network was part of the standard IT setup.
While I agree it was common, running a centralized recursive resolver for the local network is not the same as "leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver"
They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?
I wonder what pressure Qatar put on France to force this through?
BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.
Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.
They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:
Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.
French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.
So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.
they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?
they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.
> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.
To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.
What exactly are you trying to convey here? That this penalty is not an issue? Would you be willing to pay it from your pocket then? Quad9 is not Cloudflare nor Google. It's a nonprofit, in case you blinked right at the sentence that mentioned this.
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me, you’re typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.
(Per https://completemusicupdate.com/quad9-vows-to-fight-absurd-w..., https://completemusicupdate.com/opendns-pulls-plug-on-france...)
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.
But yeah, take that sony-or-whatever!
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
Or companies that sit between tricky legal and technical questions without having f-you money but especially lacking on f-you legal advice
(One thing about these founders is that they also have a hard time understanding context and follow-up questions)
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
Granted, that's the theory.
When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.
But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.
To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.
They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.
Though I guess if they stop operating in France entirely, there will simply be nothing left to sue, even if the company still exists elsewhere.
Various European countries are very good at that, starting from UK brexiting the EU, Germany shutting down all their nuclear power plants. Do not get started on accepting unlimited illegal immigration.
At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.
They're just f*ing with people without getting anyone good stuff.
Suppose they're doing this for copyright, it's not like the pirates would be stopped by a mere DNS block rule set anyway.
Because when they installed rootkits on user's machines wasn't that time?
Because when they removed content users purchased from their machines wasn't that time?
Because when they spy on what users watch on their TVs in the privacy of their home wasn't that time?
Sony is like a tree. The best time to boycott Sony was decades ago. The second best time is today.
- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.
- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?
Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."
MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"
Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
https://archive.bookstr.com/article/royalty-wars-over-star-w...
Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.
What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.
But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.
Copyright is a sham. It does not protect the small guy, only the rich corporations.
I am back to piracy, now on a moral imperative. I can pay for stuff, but I think the morally superior thing to do is to pirate away.
Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.
The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.
She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.
Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.
I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.
I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.
"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."
Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.
> or serve your citizens
This is not necessary. At all.
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.
It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.
In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!
When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.
> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.
And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.
BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.
Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.
They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260920-psg-president...
Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.
French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.
So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.
Similar to ofcom things against 4chan.
they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?
they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.
> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.
To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.