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'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court

torrentfreak.com

'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court * TorrentFreak

German publisher Axel Springer, owner of brands including Bild and Die Welt, has been given another opportunity to have ad blocking outlawed on copyright grounds. After a series of defeats in its years-long legal action against the makers of Adblock Plus, the publisher appealed to the Federal Court of Justice. Germany's top court has now overturned a 2023 ruling by the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg, referring the case back for reconsideration of the core issues.

2 comments

  • Protecting web pages under the software/writing protection law is wrong. The software is the web-browser, the page is a medium, like paper is. There is rights protection for the text, there are patents for the ideas, but there is nothing protecting the paper, nor there is for the web page.

  • Of course torrentfreak would use the most outrageous & clickbaity title possible. It's not so bad though.
    Discussed in another post:

    I speak German legalese (don’t ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.

    The way I read it, the higher court simply stated that the Appeals court didn’t consider the impact of source code to byte code transformation in their ruling, meaning they had not provided references justifying the fact they had ignored the transformation. Their contention is that there might be protected software in the byte code, and if the ad blocker modified the byte code (either directly or by modifying the source), then that would constitute a modification of code and hence run afoul of copyright protections as derivative work.

    Sounds more like, “Appeals court has to do their homework” than “ad blockers illegal.”

    The ruling is a little painful to read, because as usual the courts are not particularly good at technical issues or controversies, so don’t quote me on the exact details. In particular, they use the word Vervielfältigung a lot, which means (mass) copy, which is definitely not happening here. The way it reads, Springer simply made the case that a particular section of the ruling didn’t have any reasoning or citations attached and demanded them, which I guess is fair. More billable hours for the lawyers! @