from the cluelessness-über-alles dept
Again in September 2021 Techdirt coated an outrageous authorized assault by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is a part of the Web’s plumbing: it converts domains to numerical IP addresses. It’s operated by the Quad9 Basis, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit group. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated in alleged copyright infringement on the websites it resolves. That’s clearly ridiculous, however sadly the Regional Courtroom of Hamburg agreed with Sony Music’s argument, and issued an interim injunction towards Quad9. The German Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. or “GFF”) summarizes the court’s thinking:
In its interim injunction the Regional Courtroom of Hamburg asserts a declare towards Quad9 primarily based on the rules of the German authorized idea of “Stoererhaftung” (interferer legal responsibility), on the grounds that Quad9 makes a contribution to a copyright infringement that offers rise to legal responsibility, in that Quad9 resolves the area title of web site A into the related IP deal with. The German interferer legal responsibility has been criticized for years due to its extreme software to Web circumstances. German lawmakers explicitly abolished interferer legal responsibility for entry suppliers with the 2017 modification to the German Telemedia Act (TMG), primarily to guard WIFI operators from being held answerable for prices as interferers.
As that signifies, it is a case of a regulation that may be a poor match for contemporary know-how. Simply because the legal responsibility not applies to WIFI operators, who’re merely offering Web entry, so the German regulation must also not catch DNS resolvers like Quad9. The GFF submit notes that Quad9 has appealed to the Hamburg Greater Regional Courtroom towards the decrease courtroom’s resolution. Sadly, one other regional courtroom has simply handed down the same ruling towards the corporate, reported here by Heise Online (translation by DeepL):
the Leipzig Regional Courtroom has sentenced the Zurich-based DNS service Quad9. On ache of an administrative tremendous of as much as 250,000 euros or as much as 2 years’ imprisonment, the small resolver operator was prohibited from translating two associated domains into the corresponding IP addresses. By way of these domains, customers can discover the tracks of a Sony music album provided by way of Shareplace.org.
The GFF has already introduced that will probably be interesting together with Quad9 to the Dresden Greater Regional Courtroom towards this new ruling. It says that the Leipzig Regional Courtroom has made “a glaring error of judgment”, and explains:
If one follows this reasoning, the copyright legal responsibility of utterly impartial infrastructure companies like Quad9 can be even stricter than that of social networks, which fall beneath the notorious Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive,” criticizes Felix Reda, head of the Management © mission of the Society for Civil Rights. “The [EU] Digital Companies Act makes it unequivocally clear that the legal responsibility guidelines for Web entry suppliers apply to DNS companies. We’re assured that this misinterpretation of European and German authorized rules will likely be overturned by the Courtroom of Appeals.”
Let’s hope so. If it isn’t, we are able to anticipate corporations offering the Web’s fundamental infrastructure within the EU to be bombarded with calls for from the copyright business and others for domains to be excluded from DNS decision. The possible result’s that completely authorized websites and their holdings will likely be ghosted by DNS corporations, which can choose to err on the facet of warning reasonably than threat turning into the subsequent Quad9.
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Filed Below: article 17, copyright, digital services act, dns, eu copyright directive, felix reda, germany, hamburg, leipzig, liability, quad9, sony music, switzerland, wifi
Firms: quad9, sony music
