Bad news: copyright industry attacks on the Internet's plumbing are increasing – and succeeding:
Back in October 2021, Walled Culture wrote about a ruling from a US judge. It concerned an attempt to make the content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare, which is simply part of the Internet's plumbing, responsible for what flows through its connections. The judge rightly decided: "a reasonable jury could not – at least on this record – conclude that Cloudflare materially contributes to the underlying copyright infringement".
A similar case in Germany was brought by Sony Music against the free, recursive, anycast DNS platform Quad9. Like CDNs, DNS platforms are crucial services that ensure that the Internet can function smoothly; they are not involved with any of the sites that may be accessed as a result of their services. In particular, they have no knowledge of whether copyright material on those sites is authorised or not. Unfortunately, two regional courts in Germany don't seem to understand that point, and have issued judgments against Quad9. Its FAQ on one of the cases explains why this is a dreadful result for the entire Internet:
The court argues with the German law principle of "interferer liability" the so-called "Stoererhaftung", which allows holding uninvolved third parties liable for an infringement if they have in some way adequately and causally contributed to the infringement of a protected legal interest. If DNS resolvers can be held liable as interferers, this would set a dangerous precedent for all services used in retrieving web pages. Providers of browsers, operating systems or antivirus software could be held liable as interferers on the same grounds if they do not prevent the accessibility of copyright-infringing websites.
Now an Italian court has confirmed a previous ruling that Cloudflare must block certain online sites accused of making available unauthorised copies of material. That's unfortunate, since taken with the German court rulings it is likely to encourage the copyright industry to widen its attack on the Internet's plumbing, regardless of the wider harm this is likely to cause.
Related Stories
A proposed set of rules by the European Union would, among other things. require makers of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT,to publicize any copyrighted material used by the technology platforms to create content of any kind.
A new draft of European Parliament's legislation, a copy of which was attained by The Wall Street Journal, would allow the original creators of content used by generative AI applications to share in any profits that result.
The European Union's "Artificial Intelligence Act" (AI Act) is the first of its kind by a western set of nations. The proposed legislation relies heavily on existing rules, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act. The AI Act was originally proposed by the European Commission in April 2021.
The bill's provisions also require that the large language models (LLMs) behind generative AI tech, such as the GPT-4, be designed with adequate safeguards against generating content that violates EU laws; that could include child pornography or, in some EU countries, denial of the Holocaust, according to The Washington Post.
[...] But the solution to keeping AI honest isn't easy, according to Avivah Litan, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research. It's likely that LLM creators, such as San Fransisco-based OpenAI and others, will need to develop powerful LLMs to check that the ones trained initially have no copyrighted materials. Rules-based systems to filter out copyright materials are likely to be ineffective, Liten said.
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 13 2023, @11:33AM (3 children)
To all copyright infringers out there: Please make sure to use some Sony hardware, software or service for creating your infringing copy. That should make them liable by the very same principles they invoked here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Thursday April 13 2023, @02:14PM (2 children)
Be careful with anything Sony, they're known for installing a rootkit [wikipedia.org] through music CD's.
Maybe we should preemptively remove our processor clock, after taking out our RAM, just to make sure that nothing illegal is happening inside our computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday April 13 2023, @11:00PM (1 child)
Be careful with anything Sony, they're known for installing a rootkit [wikipedia.org] through music CD's.
Yes, I was a victim. My daughter, at the time a teenager who couldn't legally enter into a contract, played a CD she'd bought from the record store she worked at. It disabled any and every app that had anything to do with recording music, or burning a CD. I'm still pissed off.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2023, @11:26PM
Didn't that go to court?
IIRC, the settlement was three songs from their catalog.
Wasn't t precedent set then?
I Get caught copyright infringement, I gotta sing em three songs from my catalog ...
---
Deep with-in my heart lies a mel-o-dy! (Don't you wish that it would stay there? )
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday April 13 2023, @12:59PM (7 children)
CloudFlare, like most CDNs, is a pipe that watches and monetizes everything that goes through it. It's the dystopian plumbing of the internet.
I really struggle to root for CloudFlare. Anything that hurts them is good for privacy. But in this case, much as I hate to say this, I'd definitely rather the courts hadn't sided against them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 13 2023, @01:28PM (5 children)
As a CDN provider Cloudflare naturally has to charge for the service. What are your objections?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday April 13 2023, @01:33PM (4 children)
They have customers who pay for their services, and their core services aren't selling your private information to data brokers. They don't have to invade their customers' patrons' privacy to make a living, unlike, say, Google, whose entire business model revolves around setting the loot of their privacy invasion efforts.
But of course CloudFlare does it too, because it's so damn profitable.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday April 13 2023, @06:32PM (2 children)
I can't root for Cloudflare either, especially when they do "security" bullshit that only works in major browsers. I've had cases where I was suddenly unable to get to a slew of sites in Palemoon because of this. They seem to think they can tell the world what browsers are OK and that's not how the Internet is supposed to work. Fuck...them.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 13 2023, @08:08PM (1 child)
I guess you are referring to javascript embedded in the target site ("checking browser security...")? I do not understand the purpose of these checks but my understanding is that this requires cooperation between cloudflare and the target site.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @03:14AM
You could have 1 million requests but if none of the million requests run that javascript none of the requests hit the target site behind cloudflare, they just hit cloudflare.
Of course cloudflare could also do some caching so that only 1 request every 5 minutes hits the target site unless it's from the "dynamic" section of the site.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @02:14AM
How are they invading privacy?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2023, @09:18PM
CloudFlare shields the identity of pirate site owners and allows them to operate relatively unmolested, last time I checked. So it's probably a good thing they are dominant. The good times will not last though.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday April 13 2023, @01:35PM (4 children)
DNS is not the critical feature necessary for internets working. Also, it is the weakest one.
We should have invented some better naming scheme, names to addresses translation and query protocol long time ago. Completely independent on DNS abomination.
Back to the roots: remember FidoNet zoned nodelist and its proper distribution and integration methods? Even Unix hosts file is just a toy to that...
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 5, Informative) by GloomMower on Thursday April 13 2023, @02:53PM (3 children)
Hard to switch once things get going.
There are blockchain DNS systems like namecoin or ether dns, and pDNS "proof of concept"
https://www.edns.domains [www.edns.domains]
https://www.namecoin.org/ [namecoin.org]
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/20sp-cs244b/projects/pDNS.pdf [stanford.edu]
Maybe there are others.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 13 2023, @10:54PM (2 children)
There are. This one [ietf.org] doesn't use a blockchain. Rather it uses PKI (which makes a whole lot more sense for this use case if you ask me):
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday April 14 2023, @05:27PM (1 child)
Good one.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 14 2023, @05:58PM
And (see link in my comment) while still only a draft, it's meant to be a free and open IETF standards-track protocol, unlike many others are either proprietary or shilled by folks trying to make a buck on it.
There are a bunch of different approaches to decentralized name resolution, but blockchains seem to be most everyone's favorite masturbatory fantasy these days.
While blockchains do have important use cases, this isn't one of them IMHO.
DNS does have issues, although I think it's worked remarkably well since its introduction [rfc-editor.org] 35 years ago. Especially with the addition of DNSSEC.
Centralization is a big issue with the internet, but the concentration of resources is a bigger problem (IMHO) than the hierarchical and semi-distributed DNS.
We need symmetric internet links for everyone, not just those who are out for a buck and willing to pay out the ass for it. Which would reverse some (but not nearly enough) of the perverse incentives pushing toward centralization/commercialization.
That said, pushing decentralization in all its forms is probably a good thing.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday April 13 2023, @04:52PM (3 children)
I wonder how Italy and Germany would respond if the two services simply cease serving any client within those countries "just to be sure not to violate the rulings".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday April 13 2023, @07:09PM (2 children)
The same way China did when Google and Twitter wouldn't comply with their censorship, have a homegrown corporation do the same thing and absorb all that profit for their own people.
The tech provided by tech companies isn't usually all that valuable, but their de facto monopolies are.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 13 2023, @10:39PM
That will be a bit hard here since the CDNs customers are from the rest of the world and either Germany or Italy have much smaller populations.
Even as a company with a server in Italy, would you rather deal with the company with a track record that can reach everywhere in the world but Italy or with the small upstart that hasn't yet proven they can even reach people in Italy?
Note, from the standpoint of the economy, more smaller operations would be better than one or two huge operations, but that's not the reality.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @02:11AM
1) You do the same thing, you're arguably breaking the same laws
2) You usually need the site owner's cooperation to pretend to be the site if the site is using https. Unless of course you have arranged things so that you can MITM everyone.