DNS Provider Hit With Outrageous Blocking Order – Is Your Provider Next?

The seemingly endless battle against copyright infringement has caused plenty of collateral damage. But now that damages is reaching new levels, as copyright holders target providers of basic internet services. For example, Sony Music has persuaded a German court to order a Swiss domain name service (DNS) provider, Quad9, to block a site that simply indexes other sites suspected of copyright infringement. Quad9 has no special relationships with any of the alleged infringers. It simply resolves domain names, conveying the public information of which web addresses direct to which server, on the public internet, like many other service providers. In other words, Quad9 isn’t even analogous an electric company that provides service to a house where illegal things might happen. Instead, it’s like a GPS service that simply helps you find a house where you can learn about other houses where illegal things might happen.

This order is profoundly dangerous for several reasons. In the U.S. context, where injunctions like these are usually tied to specious claims of conspiracy, we have long argued  that intermediaries which bear no meaningful relationship to the alleged infringement, and cannot therefore be held liable for it, should not be subject to orders like these in the first place. Courts do not have unlimited power; rather, judges should confine their orders to persons that are plausibly accused of infringement or acting in concert with infringers.

Second, orders like these create a moderator’s dilemma. Quad9 faces this order in large part because it provides a valuable service: blocking sites that pose technical threats. Sony argues that if Quad9 can block sites for technical threats, it can block them for copyright “threats” as well. As Quad9 rightly observes:

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