Comment by nadermx
20 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"
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.
This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network
...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.
also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
> I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers
It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...
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> ...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.
Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
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> also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
As per usual, the answer is no. DNSSEC prevents resolver cache poisoning for trusted resolvers which validate DNSSEC. That is literally it. It provides no security against the vast majority of attacks against DNS.
Also limited protection against MitM upstream of the resolver, spoofing is prevented but denial of service is still possible.
So much this.
It's like prosecuting the asphalt guys who paved the road the bank robbers used
Sometimes when I come up with analogies they miss the mark. Yours was on point.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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ChatGPT isn’t “dumb pipes” like DNS or ISP infrastructure. Judgment/intelligence is the entire product for ChatGPT.
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
There is nothing 'dumb' about DNS. It is a 'sophisticated software to translate human readable addresses to machine-understandable and infinitely routable identifiers'.
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
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I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?
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.
I had the same question and read through it to get an answer but it is indeed not there :)
My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).
Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.
Reply in separate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111
Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?
Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?
In the last year, I have started to think that the internet was a mistake.
My theory was 'the death of the internet'. Once everyone has been scammed, once everyone has been hacked and stripped naked in public, when there are more lies than truths, when you are the tool and the computer uses you, when everything has been sold and you have nothing: then you would say, this was a mistake.
Actually, I don't know much about the history of the internet. The Sony stuff is before my time. Now you mention this, perhaps the idea that the internet was designed to be beneficial was actually a total lie.
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That was 20 years ago
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> 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.
I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.
isn't that precisely why they block most VPNs now? I worked for one, and all of our content licensing agreements stipulated that we had to block VPNs, and which vendors were allowed to give us the list of VPN addresses to block. (it's Digital Element, by the way.)
Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.
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.
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