Rights Holders Move Closer to Website Blocks via DNS Providers

People who use Cloudflare’s popular third-party public Domain Name System (DNS) resolver – via the easy to remember IP address of 1.1.1.1 – may soon find that the company is forced by the courts to block websites that have been found to facilitate internet copyright infringement (piracy).

A DNS provider will typically work to convert Internet Protocol (IP) addresses into a human-readable form and back again (e.g. 123.56.32.1 to examplezfakedomain.co.uk). Services like this tend to be provided automatically by your broadband ISP and mobile operator, thus operating seamlessly in the background, but it’s also possible to replace your provider’s DNS with one from a free third-party service.

Most people probably won’t feel a need to use custom DNS providers, but if your ISP starts to inject content (adverts etc.) and filtering systems into your website browsing, or suffers a fault / is slow with their own DNS system, then you may decide to try a third-party service and a lot of people then stick with those. However, some people will also use them to circumvent simplistic DNS-level website blocking by ISPs.

Naturally, Rights Holders are aware of this and so, after forcing ISPs around the world to block websites for internet piracy, some of them are now turning their attention to DNS providers. The first signs of this came last year, after Sony Music obtained an injunction in Germany that required the Swiss non-profit DNS-resolver Quad9 to block access to a music piracy site (here), but that ruling is currently being appealed.

According to TorrentFreak, the Court of Milan in Italy has now reached a similar outcome by ordering Cloudflare to block three P2P file sharing (torrent) sites on its public DNS resolver (Kickasstorrents, Limetorrents and Ilcorsaronero). The case was raised by local music industry group FIMI and anti-piracy group FPM – acting on behalf of Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music (Italian divisions).

Frances Moore, CEO of IFPI, said:

“These sites divert revenues away from licensed music services and ultimately those investing in and creating music. [The ruling] sends a clear message to other online intermediaries that they too may be subject to action if their services are used for music piracy.”

The preliminary ruling gives San Francisco-based Cloudflare just 30 days to implement the blocks against Italian users or face daily fines, but we’d expect them to appeal. However, DNS providers do have the capability to restrict the impact of such orders to the country where they’re made, which will be fine for now, but many of these cases are likely to be testing the waters for future action elsewhere, and against more providers (Google’s Public DNS, OpenDNS etc.).

The English court system may not have had a say in any of this yet, but under current laws it’s conceivable that they could potentially grant a similar injunction in the future, were one to be sought. The likelihood of that happening goes up if the aforementioned cases are ultimately upheld on appeal.

Naturally, Cloudflare, which has yet to comment, views themselves as being a neutral third-party service that merely caches or passes on content – one that can’t actually block the website themselves (there will still be various ways to access them).