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Does this seem fair?

You would think that running a "not for profit" DNS service would be a fairly safe operation, at least from a legal perspective.

Unfortunately, you'd be wrong if you believed that, as the operators of just such a service have discovered.

quad9 describes itself as "a free service that replaces your default ISP or enterprise Domain Name Server (DNS) configuration" and claims that it "blocks lookups of malicious host names from an up-to-the-minute list of threats". That's all good stuff, right?

Furthermore, the quad9 website states that "The Quad9 DNS service is operated by the Swiss-based Quad9 Foundation, whose mission is to provide a safer and more robust Internet for everyone"

Big round of applause from all!

However, this DNS operator has raised an alarm that we should be listening to because they've been sued and forced to censor the results of their DNS lookups by a German court.

The full story can be found on the quad9 news page.

It appears that Sony Music successfully sued quad9 to force them to bock certain lookups based on the allegation that a website illegally contained music copyrighted to Sony.

At first glance one might think "So what? Doesn't this happen all the time?"

Well it appears not. It seems that some DNS services, such as those operated by ISPs and even Google's public server do block some lookups, they generally do so to avoid facing legal action. Quad9 however, seem to have stood their ground and so Sony has taken the matter to court.

Herein lies the problem...

As a DNS operator, quad9 is not actually playing any part in the hosting or distribution of the allegedly infringing content. Quad9's role is completely content-agnostic. It simply converts a domain name into an IP number with no regard for the material that may be stored on the server being identified.

To sue quad9 for the role it plays is, IMHO, somewhat like suing Intel because the webserver hosting the offending content uses one of their processors.

If we are to protect the integrity of the internet from unreasonable manipulation by commercial entities we must ensure that only the responsible parties are subject to legal actions.

The super-crazy thing about this is that in Germany, where Sony mounted its law suit, DNS providers *are* indemnified under law from such claims however, quad9 is based in Switzerland so the courts allowed the action because a Swiss company is not protected by German law.

This is a crazy situation that ought not exist.

Sony's legal claims should be solely restricted to those who actively host or distribute the offending content, not with the innocent unrelated parties that are simply being agnostic providers of generic services -- such as quad9.

This really raises the spectre of just how easy it seems to be for those with huge wallets to stomp all over the little guys who get in the way of their desire to protect their IP or perhaps even protect their profits. The problem with any kind of law suit is that the little guy is virtually guaranteed to lose, if only by default because they can't afford the cost of fighting such an action.

In the case of the quad9 situation it's even worse because now quad9 are required by ruling of the courts, to effectively block the offending domain lookup -- but only for requests made from computers based in Germany. That involves extra code, extra configuration and extra work for quad9 themselves. As they claim, quad9 are being required to carry the financial burden of protecting Sony's intellectual property even though they are an innocent third party that does not profit in any way from what's going on.

How do we fix things that are this broken?

Carpe Diem folks!

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