Comment by loup-vaillant
2 months ago
> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders
Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.
What's even worse: the court fined us because they claimed this use case was in some way in contempt of their ruling. Then, when we won the overall case, that money was never returned because it wasn't specifically referenced by the final court. The response from the lower court was effectively: "Well, you will need to sue the court to get that money back." <table flip>
Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)
>wasn't specifically referenced by the final court.
Maybe your lawyer fucked up? Did you immediately appeal the fine or request a stay pending the main action?
Appeal court ruled on the substantive case. My understanding is that in Germany it has no procedural jurisdiction to order the state treasury to refund an enforcement fine. You need restitution claim that makes the thing yet another hoop.
Cost and staff time to pursue were not significantly higher than the return. We just want to help people with security and privacy and do DNS stuff - this legal fighting is absurd and misplaced and a spectacular waste of time, but here we are.
The hubris of the courts can be stunning. Sorry from Germany.
And thanks for the great DNS service, I'm using it everywhere!
That’s insane. Thank you for the service you provide.
Maybe Mullvad can help fight this type of nonsense?
The entire point is that it can't be reasonably enforced with any granularity. Rights-holders want it to be like that so a copyright win in a single country means something has to be taken down globally.
The decision was reversed in the appeals court.
The appellate court ruled that independent recursive DNS resolvers are too far removed from the actual infringement to be held liable.
Sounds more like we should end copyright worldwide.
There may be a middle ground between the current maximalist copyright regime and ending copyright altogether.
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As language models are tolerated that is only fair in my opinion. If they are allowed to be trained with GPL licensed, copyrighted and so on data then copyright should vanish also for everyone else. The existence of LLMs with the current laws is just unfair.
Indeed it needs to happen, and even here on HN, it can be difficult for some to admit and acknowledge.
It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power to happen without violence, without backroom deals, without wedge politics and flag waving.
Just... let it go.
It's beyond obvious that copyright is not going to exist in 1000 years. Every creature on earth - especially the internet - survives by copying information. It's the most basic life force in the universe.
Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. It's time. Are there elder stateswo/men in the room who can see the writing on the wall and act with grace?
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My fear exactly.
>So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up?
Trivial to do nowadays: https://focsec.com/
>I really don't like where this is going.
German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).
German federal LE agencies have been doing it for years. Threatening to put you on lists of wanted and sanctioned individuals as a basically islamic suicide bomber for not taking down tiny things globally.
That kind of thing isn't unheard of for police agencies with moral and oversight issues, though. Orgs start seeking for bigger reasons. A simple copyright issue creatively expounded into an imaginary global drug bombing cyber trafficking crime ring takedown creates a massive internal win. So they do that.
In related news, the Spanish soccer league LaLiga successfully won an injunction against Cloudflare so that during Spanish soccer matches ISPs have to prevent access for their users to the entire Cloudflare CDN network.
The reason is that the CDN network is/was being used to illegally stream games so access to the entire CDN network is closed.
https://apnews.com/article/laliga-cloudflare-piracy-spanish-...
https://hayahora.futbol/#sobre-los-bloqueos (click "IN" to view in English)
There’s a reasonable solution. Banks and vital services that use Cloudflare need to win an injunction that enjoins LaLiga from playing matches.
German courts and technology are not always the best friends
Funny aspect is law is building demand for more capable ISP equipment devoid of principles.
Anybody can change their DNS and for an ISP to perform a man in the middle on all dns they would need to inspect every packet. Impossible
There's some irony in Germany using censorship for the purpose of ensuring people don't get into reading materials that might convince them to become... fascists who censor people
There is no irony. The German government is proto-fascist, and has been for a while, as are several other European governments. Apparently the UK now arrests more people per capita for online speech than China does.
I would like to see your definition of fascism under which the German government is proto-fascist.
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