In an ongoing escalation of its fight against online sports piracy, media giant Canal+ secured court orders compelling DNS providers Quad9 and Vercara to block access to pirate streaming sites in France. Quad9 says that it’s determined to appeal what it sees as an absurd application of copyright law. For now, however, it will block the targeted domain names globally.
Okay, I see. I’d say they might be obligated to behave that way to maintain plausible deniability. Like, if they admit they were selling a piracy service and users are entitled to a refund when the piracy gets stopped, then they become more culpable. It was always based on a thinly veiled deniability. They had to comply with occasional takedown requests for this reason.
I don’t know what the laws are like in France but they may have been worried about jail time or extra fines, and the state would want them to not issue refunds because that would punish the pirates.
Plus if you tried to sue them for it… what are the courts going to say? “You’re all pirates, get lost” is the best outcome you could hope for. I hate to say it but the de jure reality is that you were purchasing a grey-market product and the law won’t protect you in that case, and you quite literally were not purchasing a piracy service. You were purchasing hosting of torrents of an unspecified nature. That’s the risk you take on when you engage in what you have admitted is piracy. It’s very naive to expect you’re getting any kind of consumer guarantee in that case.
I say that as someone who uses these services. I’m not saying this is right, I think copyright should be abolished, but we need to understand the reality of the system we’re under.