The record company Sony Music has obtained an injunction in the district court of Hamburg (Germany) to block pirate sites at the level of the Quad9 project, which provides free access to the publicly available DNS resolver "9.9.9.9", as well as services "DNS over HTTPS" ("dns.quad9 .net/dns-query/") and "DNS over TLS" ("dns.quad9.net"). The court ruled to block domain names found to be distributing infringing music content, despite the absence of a clear connection between the non-profit organization Quad9 and the blocked service. The reason for blocking is that resolving the names of pirated sites through DNS contributes to copyright infringement by Sony.
The decision to block on the side of a third-party public DNS service was made for the first time and is perceived as an attempt by the media industry to transfer the risks and costs associated with upholding copyright enforcement to third parties. Quad9 only provides one of the public DNS resolvers, which is not related to the processing of unlicensed materials and is not related to systems that distribute such content. However, the domain names themselves and the information processed by Quad9 are not subject to copyright infringement by Sony Music. For its part, Sony Music points out that Quad9 provides in its product a blocking of resources that distribute malware and are found to be phishing, i.e. promotes the blocking of problematic sites as one of the attributes of the service.
It is noteworthy that the resulting judgment does not provide protection from liability, which is usually provided to Internet service providers and domain registrars, i.e. if the Quad9 organization does not comply with the requirement, it will be required to pay a fine of 250 thousand euros. Representatives of Quad9 have already announced their intention to appeal the decision, which is seen as a dangerous precedent that could have far-reaching consequences. For example, it is possible that the next step will be the requirement to integrate blocking into browsers, operating systems, antivirus software, firewalls and any other third-party systems that may affect access to information.
Sony Music's interest in blocking public DNS resolvers stems from the formation of the "Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet" coalition, which includes some major ISPs who have expressed their willingness to block access to pirate sites for their users. The problem turned out to be that blocking was implemented at the DNS level and users easily bypassed it using public DNS resolvers.
The practice of removing links to unlicensed content in search engines has long been practiced by copyright holders and regularly leads to curious situations due to failures of automated systems for detecting copyright infringements. For example, Warner Bros has added its own website to the block list.
The last such incident occurred just a week ago - the anti-piracy company Web Sheriff sent a DMCA request to Google to block IRC logs and discussions in the Ubuntu and Fedora mailing lists under the pretext of unlicensed distribution of the movie "2:22" (apparently, mistakenly as a pirated content were accepted posts with a post time of "2:22"). In April, Magnolia Pictures demanded that Google remove reports from Ubuntu's continuous integration system and messages from the Fedora "autoqa-results" mailing list under the pretext of unlicensed distribution of the film "Result".
Source: opennet.ru