[hakfoo]

If Sony has a problem with a specific site, the appropriate approach is to find and exert legal actions on that site itself. To go back to a pre-internet model: If you know ABC Pawn Shop is fencing stolen merchandise from your warehouse, you deal with ABC Pawn directly. Find and sue their owners, get the cops to raid them, whatever. You don't dance around and call the phone company and say "don't respond if anyone calls 411 and asks for ABC Pawn" or tell Rand McNally to take their address off of the street map and hope that solves the problem.

A lot of IP litigation seems to be focused on middlemen-- DNS providers, ad networks, ISPs, search engines-- lately. I suspect they've decided this is the "easier" target to hit. It's easier to serve a company with an above-board legal presence than some unknown in darkness-knows-what country. They also know that most legal players will decide it's cheaper to cave and deplatform their targets, rather than pay for the showdown in the courts over their actual legal responsibility.

It also seems a cleverly distasteful way around the fundamental concepts of Western legal systems-- that we settle disputes between the parties actually in conflict, rather than swiping at peripherally-related proxies.

[arp242]

Except that "ABC pawn shop" is located in Russia or China or some other corrupt authoritarian regime and that taking any action against them it not realistic. It's not the "easier" target to hit; it's often the only target to hit.

[superkuh]

Target is an interesting word choice here because it doesn't have a valance or imply anything about the ethical or legal responsibility (because there is none).

In this case hitting an easier target is like attacking someone random on the street just because they're there rather than going to the target responsible and attacking it.

[arp242]

Of course it's not a "random person"; it's a service that's directly involved with providing access to (allegedly) illegal content. Should access to this content be prevented through this means, or at all? People can reasonably disagree on various aspects of that. But "random person" is a ridiculous comparison.

[superkuh]

I suppose you're right. It's more like targeting the street signs for vandalism because it's too far to walk to the house of the guy you want to attack.

[Tozen]

This is like making the excuse that if somebody specific robs you, that retaliating against 3rd parties walking down the street that didn't do it and don't have any direct connection is legit.

If there is a beef about a violation, then take it up with those specific persons and entities. It's not acceptable to lash out and bully everybody. Worse yet, when the person is among the richest people in the room, so wants to stomp on the poor or others because they feel like it or to vent their rage.

Indiscriminate destruction of everyone's rights, freedoms, and privacy for an already rich company's profit margins, is plain wrong.

[arp242]

They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods. They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site. No one is being "bullied"; is the postal service being "bullied" when they're told to stop delivering meth over the post, or illegal firearms, or child pornography?

[hakfoo]

Actually, the Post Office has some very serious legal mandates about not being allowed to open and inspect mail. You're going to have to get court orders, and I'd expect a lot of courts would ask "If you know there's illegal stuff being mailed, wouldn't it be more efficient to cut it at the source rather than try to intercept it once it enters the mail stream?"

Demanding a general block-- "you can't deliver any mail from Bob Smith"-- would be overbroad and silly-- he might be shipping meth, but he also mailed his electric bill and Christmas cards, none of which contain meth.

Here, we have a very similar issue with DNS. The DNS provider can't meaningfully know the intent of a given query; the site in question could contain both pirated content and cat videos, and there is no way to know which is being requested.

I also can't imagine how you'd expect this to scale-- if one firm realizes they can demand one domain removed, it creates precedent where eventually every cloud service provider and ISP is buried under requests. Even assuming every one of those requests is 100% legitimate, good faith, and accurate, it's simply going to be an untenable task. Inevitably, it would go back to the courts because the finite resources of service providers can't keep up with the tsunami and something got through.

The only possible way to make the Copyright Brigade happy would be to switch to an allowlist model: only these domains explicitly blessed by the Almighty Sony are allowed to be routed.

[Tozen]

> They're not a random 3rd uninvolved party "walking down the street"; they're directly involved in delivering the goods.

That statement is false. DNS resolvers have nothing to do with piracy whatsoever nor are delivering any "goods". This is why the analogy of lashing out at 3rd parties is appropriate.

> They're also not being "retaliated" against; they're simply asked to stop assisting in providing the service to the (allegedly) illegal site.

Right now, it must be proven in court that the site is "illegal" and infringement occurred by specific persons. Not just make a claim to initiate world wide DNS censorship, where a company foolishly thinks such will help increase their profits (as various studies show it doesn't help). This attempt at bullying DNS providers can lead to general censorship by powerful companies and then government entities, once they can get the legal precedent set.

If people are fuzzy about what's going on, The Hill also did a good story about this. https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/594718-german-court-c...

The attempt at stealth pushing censorship over the web, is to have sites blocked that might contain infringing content without proving that is so in court, first. They want to be able to bully DNS resolvers based on mere allegations without due process to censor whatever sites they tell them to. These companies don't want to have to prove specific cases of infringement in court, rather they are seeking to gain the general power to censor whoever and whatever they want by gaining the legal means to do it.

[hakfoo]

The cost of dealing with a global world is that you have to work with countries that have different legal norms. Maybe that means that the local law enforcement doesn't prioritize your intellectual property. If they can't get the prosecutions they want, then maybe they need to be flashing a few more roubles or yuan to the "corrupt authoritarian regimes" to make sure they see it their way.