Quad9 has published a court decision in relation to an appeal filed in response to a court order to block pirate sites at the level of Quad9's public DNS resolvers. The court refused to grant the appeal and did not uphold the request for a stay of the injunction previously granted in a case brought by Sony Music. Representatives of Quad9 said that they will not stop and will try to appeal the decision in a higher court, as well as file an appeal in defense of the interests of other users and organizations that may be affected by such blocking.
Recall that the company Sony Music has achieved in Germany a decision to block domain names convicted of distributing music content that violates copyright. Blocking was ordered to be implemented on the servers of the Quad9 DNS service, which also serve the public DNS resolver "9.9.9.9" and the services "DNS over HTTPS" ("dns.quad9.net/dns-query/") and "DNS over TLS "("dns.quad9.net"). The blocking order was issued despite the non-profit organization Quad9's lack of direct connection with the blocked sites and systems that distribute such content, only on the grounds that DNS resolution of pirated site names contributes to Sony's copyright infringement.
Quad9 considers the blocking requirement to be unlawful, since the domain names and information that Quad9 processes are not subject to copyright infringement by Sony Music, there is no infringing data on Quad9's servers, Quad9 is not directly responsible for someone else's piracy and does not have a business - relations with distributors of pirated content. According to Quad9, corporations should not be allowed to force network infrastructure operators to censor websites.
Sony Music's position comes down to the fact that Quad9 already provides blocking of domains that distribute malware and are convicted of phishing in their product. Quad9 promotes the blocking of problematic sites as one of the attributes of the service, so it should also block pirated sites as one of the types of illegal content. In case of non-compliance with the requirement to block the organization Quad9 faces a fine of 250 thousand euros.
Despite the fact that blocking links to unlicensed content in search engines has long been practiced by copyright holders, Quad9 representatives consider shifting blocking to third-party DNS services as a dangerous precedent that can have far-reaching consequences (the next step could be the requirement to integrate blocking of pirate sites into browsers, operating systems, anti-virus software, firewalls, and any other third-party systems that may affect access to information). For copyright holders, the interest in forcing DNS servers to implement blocking is due to the fact that these services are used by users to bypass DNS filters for pirated content installed by providers that are members of the Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet coalition.
Source: opennet.ru