Quad9 has published the court ruling regarding the appeal filed in response to the judicial order to block pirate sites at the public DNS resolvers of Quad9. The court rejected the appeal and did not support the request to suspend the previously issued court injunction in a case initiated by Sony Music. Representatives of Quad9 stated that they would not stop and would attempt to challenge the decision in a higher court, as well as file an appeal to protect the interests of other users and organizations that could be affected by such blocks.
Recall that Sony Music obtained a ruling in Germany to block domain names, sites implicated in disseminating musical content that infringes copyright. The blocking was ordered to be implemented at servers the Quad9 DNS service, which also serves the public DNS resolver '9.9.9.9' and the 'DNS over HTTPS' ('dns.quad9.net/dns-query/') and 'DNS over TLS' ('dns.quad9.net') services. The blocking order was issued despite the lack of a direct connection between the non-profit organization Quad9 and the blocked sites and systems distributing such content, based solely on the fact that resolving names of pirate sites through DNS contributes to infringements of Sony's copyright.
Quad9 considers the blocking request to be unjustified, as the domain names and information processed by Quad9 are not subject to copyright infringement by Sony Music; there is no infringing content on Quad9's servers, Quad9 is not directly responsible for third-party pirate activities, and it has no business relationships with distributors of pirate content. According to Quad9, corporations should not be given the power to coerce network infrastructure operators into censoring websites.
Sony Music's position is that Quad9 already provides domain blocking for sites distributing malware and implicated in phishing. Quad9 promotes the blocking of problematic sites as one of the attributes of the service, and therefore must also block pirate sites as a type of infringing content. Failure to comply with the blocking requirement could result in a fine of 250,000 euros for Quad9.
Although link blocking for unauthorized content in search engines has long been practiced by rights holders, representatives of Quad9 view the transfer of these blocks to third-party DNS services as a dangerous precedent that could have far-reaching consequences (the next step may involve demands for the integration of piracy site blocking into browsers, operating systems, antivirus software, firewalls, and any other third-party systems that could affect access to information). Rights holders are interested in compelling DNS servers to implement blocking because these services are used by users to bypass DNS filters for pirated content set up by providers in the "Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet" coalition.
Source: opennet.ru
