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Comment by babarock | Hacker News Reader

Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?

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Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.

It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.

Well you wouldn't steal a car, why steal a book you rented from the feudal lord? It's his intellectual property.

Huh? You're not stealing the book, just reading it on another device.

Edit: not to mention that even if you were to steal a book and not pay for it, copying is kind of a victimless crime, as no one lost anything.

The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).

Granted, that's the theory.

When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.

But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.

You raise good, classic points when defending copyright. I would argue that your first examples are for the good of society, and the individual copyright protections are for the good of small creators.

Copyright enforced at this scale, for the profit of a corporation that streams their content off the infrastructure paid for by the public, does make one less comfortable.

And exclusive broadcasting rights… why is that a thing and conflated with copyright regulations? Why would the public regulator charge, say, 1M€ for the steaming right to something that will net 20M€ in advertising? That’s not really about copyright, I’d argue that it’s actually the job of the public channels to stream this content that takes place on stadiums built with public funds, streamed via a largely public TV system, etc.

I suppose the work against sports piracy is profitable enough to continue. Canal+ makes quite a lot of money, and their subscription in France is pricey compared to most other services.

They could, for starters, split the sports bundle and lower its price. Lots of people would probably pay a little bit to watch sports in 4K, instead of hunting for shady streaming websites that do 720p at best.

The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.

It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).

It is actually worse than that. This amounts to punishing someone for looking up a phone number in a phone book that someone else published.

Because they can.

Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.

Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!

You would if you could and it'd probably work.

I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.

Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!

The way it worked is that the French government forced all major ISP to block some sites.

But using a third party DNS circumvents the block, so they went after them too.

Web browsers however (unless they include a VPN or 3rd party DNS) don't allow you to access sites blocked by your ISP. Same goes with ethernet and wifi cards.

I'm not saying I agree with it but that's the logic.

Right, but many browsers include a VPN. Tor Browser bypasses any such blocks. Many browsers also let you set your own DNS servers, so you could pick one that allows circumvention. Same at the OS level, and some OSes come with built in VPN clients. I guess I just don’t see how this stops here, unless legislatures step in to limit the scope. It’s an insane theory of liability that makes all steps in the chain liable for anything bad that end users might do.

I think there's at least one clear line between DNS providers and your examples. In your examples the enjoined parted is providing being a tool - a thing someone else uses - not a service where the enjoined party themselves does the thing.

It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.

Here the DNS service is being told they can't direct traffic to pirate sites, not that they can't give out tools (e.g. browsers or local DNS resolvers) that could be used by someone else to direct traffic to pirate sites (or could be used innocently). Your examples are all the latter - tools.

> It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.

And yet some places (California for instance) are attempting to do just this by requiring some kind of vaporware AI mediator to review files before the machine operates. Intermediary liability is out of control.

While I'm no fan of that law, it isn't a case of intermediary liability. It's a case of legislators (in a baffling move) deciding that selling 3d printers (and I guess CNC mills?) without vaporware attached should be directly illegal, much like most of the world has decided selling guns should be directly illegal, regardless of how they are used.

It's not illegal to sell these because it would be illegal for the end user to make a gun with them (it might or might not be - but is irrelevant) - it's just illegal to sell them because the legislator said it is.

It’s not the same legal conception of intermediary liability as with online services, but I’d argue that it’s an extension of the same idea. The manufacturer has somehow been conceived as a legally vulnerable intermediary between the user and the printed/milled product, and the legislature is attempting to force them to interfere in the manufacturing process, with the threat of liability as a club.

This same trend is happening all over, from banking to communications to manufacturing, where private industry is deputized by force to police consumer behavior, without consumers receiving any of the usual protections provided by the legal process. We’re effectively witnessing the construction of a privately mediated police state.

The line is drawn wherever a particular judge decides it's drawn, and each judge has a different ability to understand the broader implications of the line being drawn on any individual case.

Then it might be worthwhile for legislators to put some fences around this ASAP before copyright extremism completely disassembles modern computing.

My representative in the legislature is 90+ years old and never seems to understand what I’m saying.

Yes, I believe all of those would be legal for French courts to order. Practicality of enforcement is a different question.

Potentially all of the above as long as they are not tested in court.

unfortunately, I feel all these things are going to happen within a few decades.

If phone book publishing were regulated in a way that paid content on the internet is regulated, then absolutely yes. Not only that, people who mention the existence of phone books as means to obtain phone numbers, and people developing software capable of storing phone numbers, would be threatened and harassed too, as enablers of criminal activity. Copyright leeches have enough money to buy laws favorable to them. Which, also, gives them more money to buy even more laws favorable to them. It doesn't have to make sense for you because it's not designed to serve your interests.

Because they've already got the ISPs DNS resolvers blocking shit and when they see clients from those same ISPs still connecting they get hints on which public DNS resolvers people are using. You can make a safe bet French ISPs played an active part in pointing people to go after quad 9.

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