Moin! On 21 Jun 2021, at 13:15, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

I think it is the first time there is a court ruling specifically against a public DNS resolver?

https://torrentfreak.com/sony-wins-pirate-site-blocking-order-against-dns-re...

Note the reasoning (if some german-speaking person can confirm this is a fair summary?): Well its a preliminary ruling, so I would not read to much into it yet. This will take years to sort out especially as Quad9 said they would defend against it.

Here is the link to the German article about it on heise: https://www.heise.de/news/Urheberrechtsverletzung-Sony-erwirkt-einstweilige-... There are high hurdles for getting a blocking order in Germany even for ISPs, however there were some cases that were successful. My personal opinion as a German citizen is that if ISPs have to block a site via DNS because it is illegal then the DNS Cloud providers should also have to block it. I see no reason why they should be treated differently.

...

One of the arguments that Sony brought up in court was that Quad9 already blocks various problematic sites voluntarily.

This is indeed common in court: either you are neutral or you are not and, in the second case, you can no longer claim you are "just an intermediary". When you start filtering DNS answers, it is hard to resist pressures to add more filtering. Interesting wasn’t aware of this angle to it, but IANAL.

So long -Ralf --- Ralf Weber