Quad9 wins appeal against Sony

[jug]

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.

[lucb1e]

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...

[dang]

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)

[RamRodification]

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.

[eviks]

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

[aryonoco]

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

[fxtentacle]

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."

[theandrewbailey]

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

[xbar]

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

[okasaki]

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

[ronsor]

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.

[tremon]

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

[cycomanic]

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)?

[alfanick]

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.

[dfawcus]

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.

[slow_typist]

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

[Racing0461]

> 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?

[layer8]

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.

[crazygringo]

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.

[krylon]

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.

[firebirdn99]

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

[raverbashing]

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?

[justsomehnguy]

> 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...

[Sami_Lehtinen]

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

[ikidd]

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

[stranded22]

Excellent news indeed

[arcza]

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

[nneonneo]

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 :(

[johnhtodd]

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.

JT

[crazygringo]

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.

[filmgirlcw]

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.

[jjulius]

> ... 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.

[LeifCarrotson]

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.

[chatmasta]

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

[lxgr]

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.)

[dylan604]

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