Italian Blocking Demands: Following a Bad Example

While our case in Germany has been found in favor of Quad9, we have been served with another demand from commercial interests in an EU nation to block domain names, again based on alleged copyright violations. Italian legal representatives have presented us with a list of domains and a demand for blocking those domains. Now we must again determine the path to take forward fighting this legal battle, in another nation in which we are neither headquartered nor have any offices or corporate presence.

Unsurprisingly, the group of media companies that are represented by the plaintiff (LGV Avvocati, Milan, Italy on behalf of the Federation against Music and Multimedia Piracy) are Sony Music Entertainment Italy s.p.a, Universal Music Italy s.r.l., and Warner Music Italia s.r.l. as well as the Federation of the Italian Music Industry (FIMI).

The short answer from us is that we’re going to fight this demand for censorship, but it may take us time to be certain of a full victory and completion of our case in Germany before we are able to take on another court process. Quad9 can only have a few legal fronts open at once - we are nearly entirely dedicated to operational challenges of running a free, non-profit recursive resolver platform that protects end users against malware and phishing. We are not a for-profit company with lawyers on retainer.

We have complied with the request, and these names are now blocked on Quad9 systems. Since the courts have provided again no guidance on how we determine if a request is made by someone under Italian jurisdiction, we have applied this block globally. The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders - we wish to avoid that same distraction again for the moment.

We have created an attributed blocking list with these domains on it, and they are searchable on the front page of our website in the search bar, and the results will contain information about the status and origin of the blocking requirements. When Quad9 decides to take action on this issue, we will post updates on this blog and modify our blocklists accordingly.

List of domains from Italian enforcement document:

ilcorsaronero.la, ilcorsaronero.link, ilcorsaronero.pro, ilorsaronero.in, ilorsaronero.la, kickasstorrents.to, limetor.com, limetorents.so, limetorrents.cc, limetorrents.co, limetorrents.com, limetorrents.info, limetorrents.lol, limetorrents.net, limetorrents.pro, limetorrents.to, thecorsaronero.pro