qud9 wins
After two years of legal dispute, Quad9 has won the victory against Sony, well at the time Sony Music initiated legal proceedings to force Quad9 to stop resolving certain domain names who they claimed were engaging in copyright infringing behavior.
And now, a few days ago, The Higher Regional Court of Dresden, Germany, has upheld the appeal filed by Quad9, (a DNS service provider) in a case in which a court order had been issued, at the request of Sony Music, to block pirate sites through Quad9's public DNS resolvers. Originally, the Quad9 organization was subject to a fine of 250 thousand euros in case of non-compliance of the blocking order. This decision marks the end of more than two years of efforts by Quad9 to challenge the initial decision and prevent the creation of a judicial precedent.
Quad9 filed an appeal with the Hamburg district court, but it was rejected. The organization decided to take the case to the Higher Regional Court in Dresden, which supported its position. The court considered that DNS resolution service providers cannot be held responsible for website piracy, since they act as neutral intermediaries, since DNS name resolution does not play a significant role in the activities of these sites.
EThe Higher Regional Court in Dresden found that Quad9 is not responsible for the distribution of “illegal” content because it does not initiate the transfer of that information, it does not select the recipient or the content, in addition to the fact that it is alleged that its level of responsibility in the distribution of content is not proportional to the level of responsibility of the hosting providers. Quad9, as a DNS resolver, does not store or transmit content, but simply converts the domain name to an IP address. Quad9 users do not post pirated content, they only request it.
We believe this lawsuit was an attempt to set a precedent, so that commercial rights holders could demand that sites on the Internet be inaccessible by forcing recursive resolvers to block content. We held that Recursive Resolvers have no even remotely indirect business relationship with any of the infringing parties, and that Sony's blocking demand was ineffective, inappropriately specified, and unrelated to Quad9
About the case, Quad9 mentions that it believes that companies should not be able to force network infrastructure operators to censor websites. The organization believes the shift in focus from website hacking to pressure on third-party DNS services is dangerous and could have significant implications. Quad9 warns that this change could open the door to future lawsuits to integrate blocking of sites with illegal content on a variety of platforms, which could affect users' access to information.
For its part, Sony Music argues that Quad9 already incorporates the ability to block domains into its product who distribute malware and engage in phishing. Quad9 promotes blocking problematic sites as an integral feature of its service, so according to Sony Music's position, should also include blocking “warez” sites as a measure against content that violates the law. From the perspective of copyright holders, the insistence that DNS servers 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 part of the coalition Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that after losing the case in a German court, representatives of the recording industry initiated similar proceedings in Italy. In particular, Sony Music Italia, Universal Music Italia and Warner Music Italia, together with the Italian Federation of the Recording Industry, sent a pre-trial request to Quad9 demanding the blocking of the domains of 17 popular torrent sites.
Source: https://quad9.net