Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France

Posted by farrokhi 5 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by nadermx 4 hours ago

"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."

Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.

I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.

This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"

Comment by vaylian 1 hour ago

The article rightfully mentions the Sony case, but the article is actually mainly about another company:

> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.

This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network

Comment by DaiPlusPlus 1 hour ago

...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.

...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.

also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?

Comment by swiftcoder 23 minutes ago

> I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers

It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...

Comment by giancarlostoro 27 minutes ago

> ...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.

There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.

Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?

Comment by ctippett 28 minutes ago

Sometimes when I come up with analogies they miss the mark. Yours was on point.

Comment by bitpush 4 hours ago

> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.

Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".

Comment by zamadatix 3 hours ago

I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.

Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.

Comment by yorwba 2 hours ago

> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both

Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.

Comment by iamnothere 2 hours ago

You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.

If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)

In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.

Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...

Comment by logifail 32 minutes ago

See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:

'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."

A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'

The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....

Comment by warkdarrior 3 hours ago

> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.

Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.

Comment by crote 3 hours ago

> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency

This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.

Comment by zamadatix 3 hours ago

Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?

If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D

Comment by adrianN 2 hours ago

Just shift the legal burden of ensuring that no unauthorized users use an IP to the legitimate user of the IP /s

Comment by necovek 1 hour ago

How would you imagine this could work?

A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.

Comment by throwaway894345 38 minutes ago

ChatGPT isn’t “dumb pipes” like DNS or ISP infrastructure. Judgment/intelligence is the entire product for ChatGPT.

Comment by matheusmoreira 3 hours ago

As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".

I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.

Comment by warkdarrior 3 hours ago

> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.

The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.

Comment by 10111001 2 hours ago

> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.

If that's true, so is the private property space in general.

But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.

Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.

Comment by betterunix2 2 hours ago

Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."

At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.

Comment by 10111001 59 minutes ago

> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.

That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?

Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.

> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.

That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."

> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.

Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.

> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.

Comment by throwaway894345 31 minutes ago

> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers

Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.

The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).

Comment by logifail 27 minutes ago

> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers

[citation needed] /s

"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "

https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...

"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)

Comment by 10111001 17 minutes ago

> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "

My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.

Comment by adrianN 2 hours ago

This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?

Comment by JoshTriplett 1 hour ago

Among the various options:

- Pay in advance, before the product exists.

- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)

- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.

Comment by david_for_you 1 hour ago

> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money

For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.

Comment by johncolanduoni 1 hour ago

Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?

Comment by 8note 2 hours ago

the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?

are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?

i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption

Comment by 10111001 42 minutes ago

> the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?

> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?

My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.

It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.

Comment by benibela 38 minutes ago

>the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?

they do if they build their own house and rent it out

Comment by necovek 59 minutes ago

It's called copyright as things change when works are easy and cheap to copy.

Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.

Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.

In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).

But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.

So in general, there are multiple things:

* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)

* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment

* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)

...

Comment by psychoslave 1 hour ago

They are the same yes, except we don't have yet a technology to instantly copy whatever macrosized object ad nauseam like we can with intellectual work in digital era.

If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.

Comment by logicchains 2 hours ago

> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.

They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".

Comment by 10111001 14 minutes ago

> They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time.

I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.

If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.

Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s

Comment by Doe-_ 2 hours ago

I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?

Comment by SoftTalker 2 hours ago

My question as well. I suspect they will update their terms of service to forbid use within France. Then anyone who uses their services from France will be in violation of the terms, which opens them up to legal penalties themselves.

Or perhaps they are just planning to physically withdraw any operating presence in France, so as to not have any facilities, equipment, or employees who are located in French jurisdiction.

But it wasn't clear from the article, unless I missed it.

Comment by necovek 54 minutes ago

I had the same question and read through it to get an answer but it is indeed not there :)

My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).

Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.

Comment by GTP 20 minutes ago

I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.

Comment by irusensei 3 hours ago

Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?

Comment by sunaookami 3 hours ago

Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?

Comment by nubinetwork 3 hours ago

That was 20 years ago

Comment by vaylian 2 hours ago

WP article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.

Comment by tjwebbnorfolk 1 hour ago

Ok but Sony is not a time-contiguous person. Half the people there 20 years ago are dead or retired by now.

Comment by jacquesm 2 hours ago

Yes, they've been at it for that long.

Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.

Then they became a media empire...

Comment by wahern 4 minutes ago

Japanese companies have always been heavy enforcers of IP, at least since the 1980s. For example, IIRC, they're one of the top filers of patents. Sanrio makes more money globally on their characters than Disney does. And Japan pushes for stronger international IP enforcement systems than even the US.

Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.

Comment by qingcharles 3 hours ago

It's my Roman Empire.

Comment by matkoniecz 3 hours ago

So it proves that this behavior is not new.

Comment by mrandish 1 hour ago

> I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.

While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.

Comment by mitxela 4 hours ago

And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.

Comment by 150g2 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by johnhtodd 12 minutes ago

(context: I'm the CTO of Quad9 and am one of the people dealing with the lawyers)

There is an understandable focus on "how are you going to block French users" when we have also claimed that geoIP blocking is insufficient for selectively denying resolution for certain names - we understand this conflict, but we think it is energy spent in the wrong place.

It is probable that we will use geoIP filters to block French users from our services after November 24. We could apply this same geoIP filter list now to selectively block French users from reaching the sites that we've been told to make unavailable. But this would corrupt our core premise, which is that the DNS is not the right place for this to happen, and if we comply within France to meet the requirement then we accept the worst eventual outcome for users and we still do not have legally perfect coverage. We wish to first remain consistent with our core mission, and secondarily we must remain as close to compliance as we can to the legal constraints put upon us. By accepting the demands for blocking, we would admit that such demands are permissible within our mission - that we will act on behalf of companies (or others) to create ineffective and mis-directed regimes of content constraint.

We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not. We would be admitting that we will do this for an ever-increasing number of names - we will not. We would be permitting these methods to be applied for more areas of filtering such as moral, religious, social, or political reasons - we must not.

So we accept that there is the possibility that we will have errors in our blockade, but in this case (blocking French users) we maintain consistency with our stated mission of integrity of the DNS. We would rather there be a clear distinction made for users of our services: you get the DNS as you (the user) expects, or if Quad9 is forced to pollute the service with unexpected and arbitrary number of fragmentation demands, then we will not offer the services at all.

The underlying issue is not ONLY that geoIP blocking is ineffective, but that the entire premise of any of these demands is inappropriately applied to DNS recursive resolution providers. We would hope that this discussion continues to be on the most fundamental of the disagreement we have with the outcome in this court case, not on the details of the technical implementation which have yet to be entirely decided and which can be tuned over time.

Comment by euio757 3 hours ago

Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market

> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.

> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.

(Per https://completemusicupdate.com/quad9-vows-to-fight-absurd-w..., https://completemusicupdate.com/opendns-pulls-plug-on-france...)

Comment by mschuster91 1 hour ago

Rare Cisco W lol

Comment by JokerDan 4 hours ago

DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 hours ago

Keep resolving, but instead of resolving multiple A records, resolve just one. Fuck that one server in particular.

Delay updates by 1 week.

Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.

Comment by SoftTalker 1 hour ago

Then you're harming your own customers/users as much as anything. They probably don't want to do that.

Comment by bambax 2 hours ago

Resolve to porn.

Comment by WhyNotHugo 3 hours ago

While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated

Comment by rpdillon 3 hours ago

Fair point. I'd say "We're neutral, unless you attack us, in which case we stop being neutral about you, in particular". I'd still use them if this were the policy.

Comment by vanviegen 2 hours ago

Yeah, until your kid wants to use the PlayStation.

Comment by z3c0 36 seconds ago

[delayed]

Comment by Pxtl 42 minutes ago

I mean if they're getting sued for failing to block proxy/vpn services they're being told to be opinionated and they can't be a neutral service. "You asked us to be opinionated about traffic, so we're doing that. Do you want us to go back to being neutral?"

Comment by hoherd 21 minutes ago

This would hurt their users by making their DNS services less useful than competitors.

Comment by polski-g 3 hours ago

Redirect porn websites domains to them.

Comment by numpad0 2 hours ago

That's risking yourself getting flashbanged on a plane for suspicion of human trafficking and sacrilegious creation of fictions and engaging in Antaractican nuclear programs.

Comment by raverbashing 4 hours ago

Obviously

The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products

They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD

(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)

Comment by anonymous908213 3 hours ago

Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.

"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by AspireOne 3 hours ago

What "types" of companies do you mean exactly?

Comment by raverbashing 3 hours ago

Tomato sauce companies?

Or companies that sit between tricky legal and technical questions without having f-you money but especially lacking on f-you legal advice

(One thing about these founders is that they also have a hard time understanding context and follow-up questions)

Comment by tredre3 3 hours ago

Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.

That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.

But yeah, take that sony-or-whatever!

Comment by millerm 25 minutes ago

Isn't the intent of rejecting, or boycotting, a company supposed to cause a disruption in the first place? If the people boycotted a company into bankruptcy, because said company refused to change their behavior, would the people be in the wrong because it might hurt the users? No.

Comment by lljk_kennedy 2 hours ago

Well, the user of that company, not the users of the DNS service.

Comment by babarock 4 hours ago

Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?

Comment by teroshan 4 hours ago

Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.

It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.

Comment by JoshTriplett 4 hours ago

The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.

Comment by betterunix2 2 hours ago

It is actually worse than that. This amounts to punishing someone for looking up a phone number in a phone book that someone else published.

Comment by rdtsc 3 hours ago

It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).

Comment by pixl97 4 hours ago

Because they can.

Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by smsm42 1 hour ago

If phone book publishing were regulated in a way that paid content on the internet is regulated, then absolutely yes. Not only that, people who mention the existence of phone books as means to obtain phone numbers, and people developing software capable of storing phone numbers, would be threatened and harassed too, as enablers of criminal activity. Copyright leeches have enough money to buy laws favorable to them. Which, also, gives them more money to buy even more laws favorable to them. It doesn't have to make sense for you because it's not designed to serve your interests.

Comment by astrobe_ 2 hours ago

The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).

Granted, that's the theory.

When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.

But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.

Comment by crote 3 hours ago

Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by mitxela 4 hours ago

You would if you could and it'd probably work.

I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.

Comment by iamnothere 3 hours ago

Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!

Comment by gpm 1 hour ago

I think there's at least one clear line between DNS providers and your examples. In your examples the enjoined parted is providing being a tool - a thing someone else uses - not a service where the enjoined party themselves does the thing.

It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.

Here the DNS service is being told they can't direct traffic to pirate sites, not that they can't give out tools (e.g. browsers or local DNS resolvers) that could be used by someone else to direct traffic to pirate sites (or could be used innocently). Your examples are all the latter - tools.

Comment by eloisant 1 hour ago

The way it worked is that the French government forced all major ISP to block some sites.

But using a third party DNS circumvents the block, so they went after them too.

Web browsers however (unless they include a VPN or 3rd party DNS) don't allow you to access sites blocked by your ISP. Same goes with ethernet and wifi cards.

I'm not saying I agree with it but that's the logic.

Comment by iamnothere 1 hour ago

Right, but many browsers include a VPN. Tor Browser bypasses any such blocks. Many browsers also let you set your own DNS servers, so you could pick one that allows circumvention. Same at the OS level, and some OSes come with built in VPN clients. I guess I just don’t see how this stops here, unless legislatures step in to limit the scope. It’s an insane theory of liability that makes all steps in the chain liable for anything bad that end users might do.

Comment by progval 2 hours ago

Potentially all of the above as long as they are not tested in court.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by iAMkenough 2 hours ago

The line is drawn wherever a particular judge decides it's drawn, and each judge has a different ability to understand the broader implications of the line being drawn on any individual case.

Comment by iamnothere 2 hours ago

Then it might be worthwhile for legislators to put some fences around this ASAP before copyright extremism completely disassembles modern computing.

Comment by iAMkenough 49 minutes ago

My representative in the legislature is 90+ years old and never seems to understand what I’m saying.

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by strenholme 14 minutes ago

I’ll bite. I have written a recursive DNS resolver. It’s buggy, mind you, it doesn’t handle improperly configured domains bug-for-bug the way BIND9 does, it doesn’t support IPv6 for resolving records (it can still resolve AAAA records, mind you), but it’s about 80 kilobytes in size, runs nicely on 32-bit systems, and does full DNS resolution starting from the root servers.

Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content? Am I now required to add these domains, and make them part of a mandatory block list? Will I still be held liable if people can still access these allegedly copyright infringing domains by modifying the source to my program?

Keep in mind that when Quad9 had a similar lawsuit in Germany, they blocked queries from German IPs, but the idiots said Quad9 was still liable because people could use VPNs in Germany to bypass their geoIP blocking.

Quad9 being forced to block these domains will achieve nothing. Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1? Level3 for 4.2.2.1? Will they go after ISC for BIND? NLnet Labs for Unbound? CZ.NIC for KnotDNS? Me for MaraDNS? Even if they enjoin me from making a recursive resolver which can resolve these domains, that won’t stop anyone and everyone from forking my code (see also: Twitter trying to take down Nitter).

Comment by bragr 3 minutes ago

>Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1?

they already have.

Comment by 0x0000000 4 hours ago

Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?

To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.

Comment by eloisant 3 hours ago

They're removing all presence they have in France, their servers mostly.

They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.

Comment by keoneflick 3 hours ago

Do you think they will geoblock in addition to physically leaving?

Comment by punchmesan 2 hours ago

Probably. They will want to do everything possible to be able to prove that they took all measures at their disposal to stop serving the French market on top of taking all measures to have their business operations be outside of French jurisdiction.

Comment by LoganDark 2 hours ago

Then Sony (or whoever) will simply use a VPN to bypass the block...

Though I guess if they stop operating in France entirely, there will simply be nothing left to sue, even if the company still exists elsewhere.

Comment by bwoodcock 2 hours ago

Unfortunately France is also a Lugano signatory, so we'll have to eventually prevail in France as well as Germany, and that will be a long and expensive project.

Comment by duped 30 minutes ago

beIN also sued the VPNs

Comment by Narishma 1 hour ago

beIN, not Sony.

Comment by OptOutDesk 4 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by disiplus 3 hours ago

You stop serving anything for french ips. Its like you dont exist.

Comment by hk__2 3 hours ago

"french ips" don’t mean anything as the post said; see their case in Germany.

Comment by disiplus 2 hours ago

no, its different, in german case they served germany as a whole but for queries that where supposed to be blocked in germany they did not serve those to germans.

so you operated in germany and your "tricky" way to follow the regulations did not work. if you dont resolve to german customers at all, like you dont exist then nobody can theoretically say you are operating in german. so that is the difference for me.

Comment by djha-skin 3 hours ago

...That's just geoIP blocking, which he covered in his comment.

Comment by disiplus 2 hours ago

no its not, one is you dont resolve anything for the country and therefore dont operate in it, the other is you operate in the country and the block you implemented does not work for my customer. similar how a lot of the US pages blocked europeans from accessing because they did not want to follow the cookie laws.

Comment by einsteinx2 1 hour ago

> one is you dont resolve anything for the country

And the only way to do that is via GeoIP blocking…

Comment by artooro 4 hours ago

Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.

Comment by prmoustache 23 minutes ago

France is not doing anything. This is BIG SOCCER suing the hell of everyone.

Comment by HackerThemAll 2 hours ago

> France is shooting themselves in the foot.

Various European countries are very good at that, starting from UK brexiting the EU, Germany shutting down all their nuclear power plants. Do not get started on accepting unlimited illegal immigration.

Comment by tjwebbnorfolk 1 hour ago

uh oh you hit over the hackernews xenophobe tripwire by mentioning anything but absolute support for unlimited migration. prepare for the downvotes

Comment by bar8uyr 20 minutes ago

Exactly. The first step towards learning from your mistakes is admitting to them.

Comment by DemiGuru 4 hours ago

I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.

Comment by skrause 2 hours ago

> Yet, they were still ordered to block the content.

At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.

Comment by alberth 3 hours ago

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568579

Comment by miohtama 1 hour ago

The person behind this legal warfare is the beIN Sports chairman, Nasser Al-Khelaifi. He is also president of Paris Saint-Germain and chairman of Qatar Sports Investment.

He is, obviously, not French.

His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.

Comment by ghusto 8 minutes ago

We've all seen this sort of thing many times before, but I still don't understand how it works.

I transmit a radio signal in Dover that can be picked up by radios in Calais, the message it carries happens to be illegal in France ("Brittany is still part of the UK", say). Could I be taken to court in France? I'm guessing no.

Comment by corvad 2 hours ago

Reminds me of Cloudflare going down every time there was a football game in Spain as the ISPs blocked all the "bad" ips, which ironically also served government websites.

Comment by ErneX 1 hour ago

It’s still happening every time there is football, at least they now seem to lift the block when the games end, when this started sometimes they took 12 hours after the game ended.

Comment by schleck8 15 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by chaboud 12 minutes ago

I'm super confused as to what it means to withdraw for French users if geoIP doesn't work.

So remove 9.9.9.9 BGP announcements? Unless France wants to build a great firewall... a Ligne Maginot du DNS, I don't see how this is enforceable. The internet is not Minitel...

Comment by this_user 3 hours ago

Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.

Comment by privacyishuman 1 hour ago

Also, hosting location is kind of a deception for real ways to protect data, like E2EE, which work no matter the country.

Comment by nairboon 3 hours ago

Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.

Comment by drnick1 2 hours ago

Switzerland is not in the EU, thankfully. And it seems to be one of the few places left in Europe where privacy is taken somewhat seriously.

Comment by bwoodcock 2 hours ago

Indeed. If it were just a question of Swiss law, we'd be in excellent shape. The problem is that France and Switzerland are both signatories to the Lugano Convention, while the US is not. As long as the Quad9 Foundation has to have a legal domicile somewhere, there will always be some lever that can be used against it. Switzerland was the best place, but does not offer perfect protection.

Comment by sltkr 1 hour ago

Switzerland has its own DNS blocklist that all ISPs obey. [1]

Quad9 doesn't obey it but I never understood how they can get away with that legally. I'd be interested in an explanation if someone knows more!

1. https://www.gespa.ch/en/fighting-illegal-gambling/access-blo...

Comment by einsteinx2 1 hour ago

Sounds like they get away with it legally because the law applies to ISPs and they’re not an ISP.

From your link:

> Internet service providers in Switzerland are obliged to take measures to prevent access to these domains (DNS blocking).

Comment by Helmut10001 2 hours ago

> The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet and the role of the domain name system

I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.

Comment by petcat 2 hours ago

The US doesn't compel ISPs to block websites. The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order, but that's it.

This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.

Comment by looperhacks 1 hour ago

It hasn't passed yet, but legislators are very hard at work trying to "catch up". [1][2]

And there are other countries outside the US and Europe, it's not just a "EU" thing. (I wanted to write North America first, but even Canada does blocking, in some cases even without court orders [3])

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-reviving-site... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/congress-has-another-s... [3] https://piracymonitor.org/canada-evolving-piracy-threats-pro...

Comment by MentalM 1 hour ago

> The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order

Aren't that is about the same?

Comment by xyst 39 minutes ago

At least in the US, it’s not a matter of "understanding". It’s a matter of "you are paid to misunderstand".

The law is vast and subject to various levels of interpretation. If there’s anything I have learned is that the court is just a rich persons weapon to "peacefully" resolve problems. In this modern capitalistic, greedy shithole we have dug ourselves into. Money and resources talks.

Comment by _imnothere 4 hours ago

Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

They're just f*ing with people without getting anyone good stuff.

Suppose they're doing this for copyright, it's not like the pirates would be stopped by a mere DNS block rule set anyway.

Comment by antiframe 3 hours ago

> Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

Because when they installed rootkits on user's machines wasn't that time?

Because when they removed content users purchased from their machines wasn't that time?

Because when they spy on what users watch on their TVs in the privacy of their home wasn't that time?

Sony is like a tree. The best time to boycott Sony was decades ago. The second best time is today.

Comment by ErneX 5 minutes ago

Read the article, it’s not Sony it’s Bein the ones who have the soccer broadcast rights.

Comment by Narishma 1 hour ago

Why are so many comments talking about Sony? The case was brought by beIN Sports.

Comment by einsteinx2 1 hour ago

Because Sony was mentioned once in the article in reference to a different earlier case and people seem to have stopped reading there to come here and immediately complain about Sony.

Comment by raquuk 3 hours ago

Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.

Comment by nish__ 4 hours ago

How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%. I have no idea why we still put up with them.

Comment by numpad0 4 hours ago

FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.

Comment by skrause 2 hours ago

And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?

Comment by coryrc 1 hour ago

> what would we lose?

Who is "we"? Going back to the origin of Free Software to proprietary printer drivers causing hardware to be unfixable by its users and otherwise become ewaste. The loss is users are nearly beholden to the manufacturer to customize or maintain their own devices. Android phones, most ereaders, can have long lives when obsolete, but this is only because Linux is Free Software; with proprietary kernels they are entirely ewaste instead of a small fraction having continuing life. OTOH most do become ewaste. OAH this Free Software allows competitors to start from almost the same place and prevent total monopolies, hence why Apple makes most of the profit and I can buy a $150 phone instead of what appears to be $799 minimum from Apple.

But, I think 20 year-old software is probably mostly safe from the above effects and I'm not sure GP was arguing otherwise, just against total absence of copyright.

Comment by nish__ 3 hours ago

No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.

Comment by tredre3 3 hours ago

> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.

Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."

MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"

Comment by immibis2 47 minutes ago

MIT is free-for-all-to-do-whatever. You can do literally anything, except remove a short text notice that has zero legal or practical value. You can even hide the text notice very deeply, so that it's effectively been removed. You can fork and stop releasing source code, you can use it for AI training, you can add DRM to the product and make it illegal to remove.

Comment by mahboi 1 hour ago

I think projects should be able to license their work how ever they want within reason, which GPL and MIT clearly are. At the same time, I don't see what material difference this makes. The spirit of GPL doesn't seem maintained, cause at this point it's very clearly being used for profit in proprietary systems that stay compliant by not technically distributing any GPL'd code. LLMs appear to legally wash away GPL for now, still grey area though. And GPL is straight up violated all the time, especially in countries that don't care.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by numpad0 2 hours ago

Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.

Comment by pessimizer 2 hours ago

FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)

Comment by immibis2 49 minutes ago

There was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry."

The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some trade deal with the US about food staples, but were swiftly informed by the US that if they didn't make DMCA 1201 into Chilean domestic law, the US would completely cut off their trade. This stuff is serious business for the US and no other country is in the geopolitical position right now to question it.

Fortunately since the US is mid-collapse that last point may change soon.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-natio...

Comment by dist-epoch 3 hours ago

How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.

Comment by christophilus 3 hours ago

Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.

Comment by drnick1 2 hours ago

This. Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing. People need to realize that human knowledge is so vast now that such tools (which effectively perform data compression and interpolation) are absolutely necessary. I don't feel bad for copyright holders at all because copyright shouldn't probably exist at all.

Comment by bigstrat2003 1 hour ago

> Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing.

It is. But that is also not particularly relevant to the point. As long as the AI companies operate under the same rules as everyone else, I don't really care. If they can use copyrighted works for training, we should all be able to use those works. Conversely if we can't use something due to copyright, neither should the AI companies be able to.

Comment by SoftTalker 1 hour ago

Is it still a worthy goal if it the knowledge includes the rantings of every lunatic on X or Reddit? If it hallucinates facts and even citations in its non-deterministic reconstruction of the knowledge it ingested?

Comment by sham1 3 hours ago

The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.

Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)

Comment by nish__ 3 hours ago

It makes me feel like the rules are "for thee, not for me." Like it proves that the rich can just do whatever they want.

Comment by betterunix2 2 hours ago

Is there some reason I should have a problem with it?

Comment by bigstrat2003 2 hours ago

> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%.

I don't think that claim is true, personally. But if we grant it for the sake of argument, it should be completely unsurprising that copyright hasn't been abolished. Governments primarily serve the powerful and wealthy, not the common man.

Comment by cyanmagenta 4 hours ago

> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%

Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.

Comment by roblabla 3 hours ago

I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?

https://archive.bookstr.com/article/royalty-wars-over-star-w...

Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.

Comment by numpad0 2 hours ago

Authors and artists have no basis for payment in the absence of copyright laws. Like, anything they make would be literally free to steal. Literally... 1700s? Late 1600s?

What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.

Comment by betterunix2 2 hours ago

Copyright was established for the benefit of publishers, not authors. In the 1600s publishers were licensed, as part of a censorship system; the point was to only give licenses to publishers who followed the censorship rules. It was quite profitable for the publishers because they faced far less competition than they otherwise would.

The censorship system was abolished but the publishers wanted to keep the licensing system, so they came up with a new idea: licensed monopolies to publish specific books.

Comment by arto 1 hour ago

Exactly right. Karl Fogel's excellent write-up recaps the history: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html

Comment by cyanmagenta 3 hours ago

I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.

But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.

Comment by warkdarrior 3 hours ago

> But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.

Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.

Comment by nish__ 4 hours ago

Copyright laws don't benefit independent artists. They only work for you if you can afford a litigation team.

Comment by AndroTux 4 hours ago

The 1% just copied all available data without consequence. Yet, Quad9 gets sued and loses.

Comment by surgical_fire 3 hours ago

AI companies already ripped those things off.

Copyright is a sham. It does not protect the small guy, only the rich corporations.

I am back to piracy, now on a moral imperative. I can pay for stuff, but I think the morally superior thing to do is to pirate away.

Comment by sham1 3 hours ago

While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.

Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.

Comment by rickydroll 3 hours ago

All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.

She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.

Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.

Comment by bigstrat2003 1 hour ago

> All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

That is the fault of the way the legal system works, not anything to do with copyright law. It is true that we need a system in which you can't just get away with breaking the law if you have deeper pockets than your victim, but that will be true whether or not we have laws protecting copyright.

Comment by rickydroll 6 minutes ago

The question I have is what is copyright for? As far as I can tell, it is used for censorship, and rent extraction.

Comment by dev_l1x_be 1 hour ago

The internet is a distributed system, they said.

Comment by Bender 4 hours ago

I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:

- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.

- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?

Comment by drdexebtjl 2 hours ago

DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.

Comment by Bender 1 hour ago

DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.

As far as I know there is no way to reliably:

- let the user see this error. The client would need to surface the DNS EDE error. Stub resolvers and browsers overwhelmingly ignore EDE.

- geo-fence the client. Unbound does not have native Geo support and will not let one set custom per-zone EDE text even if that was a thing AFAIK.

This might be possible by putting dnsdist in front of Unbound with client IP rules + Lua + MaxMind but there again the client won't know what to do with this.

- custom views only trigger off client IP's and only control resolution views, not error messages.

I think it's probably best that if people wish to run their own DNS instances, they do not geo-block anything. France has no jurisdiction in other countries and can't really do anything to "Alice and Bob's Public DNS". It's up to the people in France to find a way to tunnel their traffic out of their country to bypass any border filters should that ever become a thing. I am still waiting for a lawyer to challenge my thinking on this part.

Comment by drdexebtjl 1 hour ago

I don’t want the user to see the error, I just want the browser/the operating system’s resolver to not be a stub resolver, and actually ask the authoritative servers when something like this fails on a non-authoritative response.

Public DNS like Quad9 should be a cache (because recursing is pretty slow) and, at most, a way to find the IPs of the root name servers.

Courts asking non-authoritative resolvers not to resolve a name should have no effect on clients successfully resolving that name, such that they wouldn’t even have a reason to go after Quad9 or Alice and Bob, and would have to go after the TLD registry (likely in a different jurisdiction).

Comment by aborsy 1 hour ago

France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France, because apps don't comply with the rules imposed by bureaucrats or more often developers find procedures cumbersome or unfamiliar

Comment by EmbarrassedHelp 15 minutes ago

Macron's party has also been trying to require encryption backdoors for years, and are major supporters of Chat Control.

Comment by paulgdp 1 hour ago

Can you tell more? Which apps?

Comment by aborsy 1 hour ago

Syncthing apps for example. Search for example comments of Synctrain app developer in syncthing forum.

Comment by jeroenhd 3 hours ago

Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.

Comment by intrasight 3 hours ago

Sports is the only thing left of value in broadcasting. I can totally understand why they're gonna fight tooth and nail to protect it.

Comment by asdff 14 minutes ago

They still get paid when people watch pirated streams. All those billboards against the pitch and on every uniform are still getting their viewership.

It would be interesting if one of these advertisers one day actually sued the broadcasters for going after pirated streams and diminishing the value of their ad placements as a result. I would think it is technically damages. One just has to quantify it a little.

Comment by declan_roberts 4 hours ago

Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.

Comment by asdff 18 minutes ago

US just pushes the enforcement mechanisms to private companies not so hamstrung by legalese. E.g. try and torrent all you want. After all, all you are really doing observably is connecting to various IPs, essentially no different than browsing websites. But you might get a letter in the mail not from the government, but from the ISP threatening legal action against you, solely because their systems saw your IP connected to another.

Comment by AndroTux 4 hours ago

As long as you don’t say Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence, you’re all good.

Comment by Qiu_Zhanxuan 52 minutes ago

Genuinely baffled by the incompetence (or ill-intent, corruption?) demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar ? Another stain on our country's reputation but they don't care.

Comment by xyst 42 minutes ago

> demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar

Honestly, this is a possibility.

beIN, like any Qatar based company, is majority owned by the state. Qatar is infamously rich in oil with the state able to subsidize luxury lifestyles for citizens it deems worthy.

France needs oil, like any other country. So if a journalist could follow the money. Could probably find where the pressure was applied within the government.

The rich using archaic copyright laws to get their way has been modus operandi for quite awhile. Seen this applied both in USA and abroad.

Comment by trentor 4 hours ago

Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.

Comment by whh 3 hours ago

> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.

"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."

Comment by gumby 4 hours ago

Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.

I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago

It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.

The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.

It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.

Comment by gumby 4 hours ago

We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).

In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?

I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!

Comment by toast0 4 hours ago

> We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver.

When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.

> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?

Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.

Comment by SoftTalker 1 hour ago

You'd have to go back to the 1980s I think, when systems were still using /etc/hosts and if the host you wanted to talk to wasn't listed there you'd have to use its IP address directly.

IIRC there were some trusted lists of "well known" hosts that were passed around between administrators. DNS was invented because that obviously became impractical quickly as the internet grew.

Comment by lokar 3 hours ago

Back then most computing was done in office, lab, university settings. Running recursive resolvers for the local network was part of the standard IT setup.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by toast0 3 hours ago

While I agree it was common, running a centralized recursive resolver for the local network is not the same as "leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver"

Comment by lokar 3 hours ago

Sure, but it goes with a more centralized approach to systems management in general. The attitude was often that all of the computers were one thing.

Comment by modeless 2 hours ago

Seems unlikely to resolve their legal issues, as the French lawyers will use the same tactic as the German ones, using a VPN to access the services from France to justify continuing their lawsuits. Perhaps they should consider relocating out of Europe.

Comment by Felger 4 hours ago

"There are more important reasons geoIP blocking will not work."

Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...

Comment by burnte 4 hours ago

They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.

Comment by Jepacor 4 hours ago

Welp, I've been using quad9 and I'm French, does anyone have an alternative I can switch to?

Comment by capitol_ 3 hours ago

I recommend Norway, they have lovely fjords.

Comment by drcongo 3 hours ago

This comment made my day, beautiful.

Comment by driverdan 1 hour ago

You keep using it. They're not going to block your IP but response times may drop since they won't have any servers in France.

Comment by Vax- 2 hours ago

DNSCrypt or RethinkDNS (the resolver, not the app, although the app is awesome as well)

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by egorfine 3 hours ago

Why stopping serving french IPs though? Remove your legal presence in France, sure. But block IP ranges from reaching your servers.. just why?

Comment by rpdillon 3 hours ago

Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.

Comment by egorfine 3 hours ago

> We don't operate in your country

Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.

> or serve your citizens

This is not necessary. At all.

Comment by 49369201837 2 hours ago

Better cut all ties to that failed state as quickly as possible.

Comment by MentalM 46 minutes ago

> that failed state

Aren't literally every country doing the same?

Comment by gaiagraphia 2 hours ago

I wonder what pressure Qatar put on France to force this through?

BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.

Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.

They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260920-psg-president...

Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.

Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 3 hours ago

Sometimes I wonder if the days of a global internet are drawing to a close.

Comment by martinjc 4 hours ago

Sony being sleazy again. You start to wonder why they pick on the wrong people.

Comment by coldfloor 3 hours ago

What's with all the Sony comments? This has nothing to do with Sony.

Comment by agilob 43 minutes ago

>The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

>We eventually won that case against Sony, but it took several years, six figures of cost to Quad9, and massive wasted time – all of which set us back in our ability to deliver services and is a resource debt we are still paying for today

Comment by rafram 4 hours ago

They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?

Comment by dmantis 3 hours ago

I guess the issue is that they are ordered to block it for all users, not only those particular users who picked some particular lists.

And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.

Comment by greatgib 3 hours ago

Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.

French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.

So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.

Similar to ofcom things against 4chan.

Comment by LoganDark 2 hours ago

Love to see some Lavabit action in response to government overreach. (Not that it's fun to see a provider have to shut down operations in an area, but more that I prefer to see them sticking to their principles rather than showing the government that this behavior is tolerated.)

Comment by Scaled 1 hour ago

I'm disappointed in how many pro-piracy comments are in this thread. Free speech does not mean you have the right to steal someone else's labor unencumbered. When actual free speech is blocked, then I'll be among the people rallying -- but blocking a piracy site is blocking cybercrime not legal free speech.

Comment by jiveturkey 3 hours ago

how do they not see the self-inconsistency?

they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?

they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.

Comment by AtNightWeCode 52 minutes ago

Cloudflare and Google already blocks these domains. Just saying.

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Comment by Onavo 4 hours ago

Another user commented on

> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.

To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.

Comment by jubilanti 4 hours ago

Per each infraction. They said they currently have 20 other cases pending. And who knows how many would be to come.

Comment by HackerThemAll 2 hours ago

What exactly are you trying to convey here? That this penalty is not an issue? Would you be willing to pay it from your pocket then? Quad9 is not Cloudflare nor Google. It's a nonprofit, in case you blinked right at the sentence that mentioned this.