Among the documents stolen by the “probably North Korean” hackers from Sony Pictures Entertainment was a legal memo addressed to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The memo proposes a method for holding Internet service providers (ISPs) jointly liable for piracy if they do not remove pirated sites from the root, that is, from the servers that “understand” their name, namely the DNS servers they control.
Every Internet service provider also has DNS servers. Every time a subscriber types an address into a browser, the DNS server goes to work, trying to look up the ISP’s DNS servers to find out what numerical address (IP address) that address corresponds to and route the request to its destination. If it does not find it in its own database, the server becomes a client and asks the server higher in the hierarchy to find the IP address requested by the subscriber, reaching even the highest level, that of the famous 13 servers of the DNS system, which contain the database with all the names and addresses on the entire Internet.
Once its address is found, the server takes a series of actions, such as routing traffic to and from the subscriber.
In Sony’s memo, it is apparent that it is proposed that the Union attempt to narrow the definition of DNS servers as “directories” in order to force ISPs to comply with copyright holders’ orders, without a court hearing. Otherwise, they will be held liable, secondarily, for their contribution to their subscribers’ access to the product of copy-protected content.
Such a practice could create a black market for DNS, experts comment at The Verge, put users at risk and make ISPs susceptible to false/fake requests to remove access to websites that appear to be hosting copies of protected material, in the absence of legal proceedings.
However, although the practice has been the subject of debate and was rejected by the US Senate a few years ago, the memo to the MPAA is dated August 14, 2014 and proves that Sony has not given up on its attempt to deal another blow to the uncontrolled spread of movie copies, without hesitating to use tactics that would even harm the way one finds their way on the Internet.
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