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nadermx 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."
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"
mrandish 2 minutes 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.
vaylian 39 minutes 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.
> 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".
zamadatix 2 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.
yorwba 1 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.
iamnothere 59 minutes 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.
> 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.
crote 2 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.
zamadatix 2 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
adrianN 56 minutes ago [-]
Just shift the legal burden of ensuring that no unauthorized users use an IP to the legitimate user of the IP /s
necovek 28 minutes 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.
matheusmoreira 2 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.
warkdarrior 2 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.
10111001 1 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.
betterunix2 58 minutes 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.
adrianN 45 minutes 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?
JoshTriplett 28 minutes 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.
8note 1 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
psychoslave 21 minutes 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.
logicchains 1 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".
Doe-_ 53 minutes ago [-]
I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?
SoftTalker 42 minutes 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.
irusensei 2 hours ago [-]
Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?
sunaookami 2 hours ago [-]
Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
jacquesm 56 minutes 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...
qingcharles 2 hours ago [-]
It's my Roman Empire.
matkoniecz 2 hours ago [-]
So it proves that this behavior is not new.
mitxela 3 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.
euio757 2 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.
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.
JokerDan 3 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.
drdexebtjl 3 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.
Then you're harming your own customers/users as much as anything. They probably don't want to do that.
bambax 1 hours ago [-]
Resolve to porn.
WhyNotHugo 2 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
rpdillon 2 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.
vanviegen 58 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, until your kid wants to use the PlayStation.
tredre3 2 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!
lljk_kennedy 57 minutes ago [-]
Well, the user of that company, not the users of the DNS service.
polski-g 2 hours ago [-]
Redirect porn websites domains to them.
numpad0 54 minutes 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.
raverbashing 3 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)
anonymous908213 2 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]."
3 hours ago [-]
AspireOne 2 hours ago [-]
What "types" of companies do you mean exactly?
raverbashing 2 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)
babarock 3 hours ago [-]
Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?
teroshan 3 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.
smsm42 23 minutes 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.
JoshTriplett 3 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.
betterunix2 54 minutes 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.
pixl97 3 hours ago [-]
Because they can.
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
3 hours ago [-]
rdtsc 2 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).
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.
crote 2 hours ago [-]
Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!
2 hours ago [-]
mitxela 3 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.
iamnothere 2 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!
gpm 9 minutes 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.
eloisant 27 minutes 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.
iamnothere 24 minutes 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.
progval 1 hours ago [-]
Potentially all of the above as long as they are not tested in court.
2 hours ago [-]
iAMkenough 1 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.
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
Then it might be worthwhile for legislators to put some fences around this ASAP before copyright extremism completely disassembles modern computing.
60 minutes ago [-]
aborsy 2 minutes ago [-]
France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France
0x0000000 3 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.
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.
keoneflick 2 hours ago [-]
Do you think they will geoblock in addition to physically leaving?
punchmesan 1 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.
LoganDark 59 minutes 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.
bwoodcock 45 minutes 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.
Narishma 25 minutes ago [-]
beIN, not Sony.
OptOutDesk 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
disiplus 2 hours ago [-]
You stop serving anything for french ips. Its like you dont exist.
hk__2 2 hours ago [-]
"french ips" don’t mean anything as the post said; see their case in Germany.
disiplus 47 minutes 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.
djha-skin 2 hours ago [-]
...That's just geoIP blocking, which he covered in his comment.
disiplus 40 minutes 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.
artooro 3 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.
HackerThemAll 57 minutes 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.
DemiGuru 3 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.
skrause 1 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.
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.
this_user 2 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.
privacyishuman 36 minutes ago [-]
Also, hosting location is kind of a deception for real ways to protect data, like E2EE, which work no matter the country.
nairboon 2 hours ago [-]
Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.
drnick1 1 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.
bwoodcock 42 minutes 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.
_imnothere 3 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.
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.
Narishma 22 minutes ago [-]
Why are so many comments talking about Sony? The case was brought by beIN Sports.
raquuk 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.
Helmut10001 1 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.
petcat 1 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.
looperhacks 10 minutes 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])
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?
drdexebtjl 1 hours ago [-]
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.
Bender 25 minutes 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.
nish__ 3 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.
numpad0 3 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.
skrause 1 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?
nish__ 2 hours ago [-]
No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
tredre3 2 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!"
2 hours ago [-]
numpad0 1 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.
pessimizer 1 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.)
bigstrat2003 44 minutes 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.
dist-epoch 3 hours ago [-]
How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.
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.
SoftTalker 29 minutes 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?
drnick1 1 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.
bigstrat2003 39 minutes 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.
sham1 2 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 :)
betterunix2 51 minutes ago [-]
Is there some reason I should have a problem with it?
nish__ 2 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.
cyanmagenta 3 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.
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?
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.
numpad0 1 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.
betterunix2 45 minutes 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.
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.
warkdarrior 2 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.
nish__ 3 hours ago [-]
Copyright laws don't benefit independent artists. They only work for you if you can afford a litigation team.
AndroTux 3 hours ago [-]
The 1% just copied all available data without consequence. Yet, Quad9 gets sued and loses.
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.
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.
rickydroll 2 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.
bigstrat2003 5 minutes 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.
declan_roberts 3 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.
AndroTux 3 hours ago [-]
As long as you don’t say Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence, you’re all good.
modeless 1 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.
trentor 3 hours ago [-]
Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.
whh 2 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."
jeroenhd 2 hours ago [-]
Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.
intrasight 2 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.
gumby 3 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.
ButlerianJihad 3 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.
gumby 3 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!
toast0 3 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.
SoftTalker 25 minutes 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.
lokar 2 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.
2 hours ago [-]
toast0 2 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"
lokar 2 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.
Felger 3 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...
burnte 3 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.
Jepacor 3 hours ago [-]
Welp, I've been using quad9 and I'm French, does anyone have an alternative I can switch to?
capitol_ 3 hours ago [-]
I recommend Norway, they have lovely fjords.
drcongo 2 hours ago [-]
This comment made my day, beautiful.
driverdan 27 minutes 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.
Vax- 40 minutes ago [-]
DNSCrypt or RethinkDNS (the resolver, not the app, although the app is awesome as well)
egorfine 2 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?
rpdillon 2 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.
egorfine 2 hours ago [-]
> We don't operate in your country
Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.
> or serve your citizens
This is not necessary. At all.
49369201837 1 hours ago [-]
Better cut all ties to that failed state as quickly as possible.
gaiagraphia 1 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:
Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.
4 hours ago [-]
9cb14c1ec0 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder if the days of a global internet are drawing to a close.
Scaled 27 minutes 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.
martinjc 3 hours ago [-]
Sony being sleazy again. You start to wonder why they pick on the wrong people.
coldfloor 2 hours ago [-]
What's with all the Sony comments? This has nothing to do with Sony.
rafram 3 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?
dmantis 2 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.
LoganDark 1 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.)
greatgib 2 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.
jiveturkey 2 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.
Jeeetendra 36 minutes ago [-]
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murmur-app 39 minutes ago [-]
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nmwp 3 hours ago [-]
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akung8x8 18 minutes ago [-]
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Onavo 3 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.
jubilanti 3 hours ago [-]
Per each infraction. They said they currently have 20 other cases pending. And who knows how many would be to come.
HackerThemAll 1 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.
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"
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.
> 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
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
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.
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.
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".
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.
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
> 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...)
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
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!
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)
"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]."
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)
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.
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.
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.
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.
At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.
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.
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.
I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.
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...
- 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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 :)
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.
> or serve your citizens
This is not necessary. At all.
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.
And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.
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.
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.
> €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.