German court overturns previous ruling that ad blocking isn't piracy
'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court * TorrentFreak
sorry for butchering the article title, I've edited my post to try and reflect the intention of article
If I understand it correctly, they're arguing that any unauthorized "modification of the computer program" (i.e. the web page) is a copyright violation.
This wouldn't only affect adblockers... this would affect any browser feature, extension, or user script that modifies the page in any way, shape, or form... translators, easy reading modes, CSS modifiers (e.g., dark mode for pages that don't have it, or anything that improves readability for people with vision problems), probably screen readers...
This would essentially turn web browsers into the HTML equivalent of PDF readers, without any of the customisability that's been standard for decades...
Yeah, it's actually really really stupid. If they say this is true, then you can say a website is changing the code of the actual browser as well
yeah I don't know how German courts work but if rulings set precedents then people could run wild with this
Anyone else looking forward to the advancements in ad blocking in the future?
time to send TCP packets containing advertisements to German IPs, then sue them for blocking my packets.
You and I both know that these precedents get concocted to be selectively applied. There's no concern for the actual letter of the law here, it's just a means to an end.
i'm gonna block ads even more just to spite the germans
I'm sure most of the Germans will continue using their illegal adblockers. This ruling is ridiculous.
They have not been declared illegal (yet). The lower court just has to consider additional aspects according to the BGH and may possibly come to a different decision. In any case this only applies to adblock plus for now.
Yeah fr fuck them Jerries
I would VERY much appreciate a court ruling that makes spreading misinformation and propaganda illegal
Let's take a deep breath and consider what's happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.
It's entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it's not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it's eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.
So the headline should read more like "German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement."
The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.
isn't overturning a previous ruling kind of clear intention? what other purposes does this have?
To have a proper justice system.
As the main comment explained: this is not saying "you got the wrong result", this is saying " the way you reached that result is not the proper way for our justice system".
So they are just saying that the lower court didn't do it's due diligence and needs to look again at the case, this time considering the parts they missed the first time.
It is not uncommon in Germany that cases like this end in the same result
To try and explain it in an easier to understand way:
Person X murders Person Y
Court A says "Guilty, because you suck"
Court Higher B says: "Suckiness is not a proper judicial term, do the whole thing again"
Court A says "guilty, because here is the witness testimony, your finger prints on the murder weapon and the video footage of you killing person Y".
Same result as before, but this time in a proper manner fitting a proper judicial system.
No. This is how the legal system works. When you appeal to a higher court, they can make a call themselves when massive mistakes were made at the lower level or they can say the lower court overlooked something and then make them redo their work. It's a convenient choice for the higher judges not to have to do more work themselves. But it's part of the process.
Is returning it to a lower court overturning a ruling?
This sounds more like as described - "redo it". Overturning would be this court literally "over turning" and saying adblock is piracy.
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! @
thanks for that link. I've got my own arguments but that person seems closer to an educated person than I am
So why do they speak german legalese?
This device is now mandated to watch TV or browse the internet in Germany:
Welp, guess I'm a YouTube pirate now
It can't be said often enough: fuck Axel Springer.
They didn't rule it, they overturned a previous decision. Not that this isn't bad but it does not mean right now that using ad blockers is illegal. I also think reading other articles on this, that the ruling is also more focused on Adblock plus working with advertisers to allow some ads but block others.
That’s foul. I wouldn’t touch YouTube without Ublock. You ever try watching that garbage without it?
The one app game I like(d) was Scrabble. It was sold and is now an endless stream of ads. Turn, ad, turn, ad, turn, ad, nonstop. It’s unplayable. I had to delete it.
Ad blockers make media consumable. Granted, less screen time would likely benefit everyone.
AdGuard for Android. It's brilliant
I don't touch youtube with a browser.
Grayjay. Or Newpipe.
If I just have to use a browser, then Invidious.
yt-dlp
Or, to make a historical reference to a very similar case that failed miserably for RIAA and was a great win for FOSS: youtube-dl
Thank you! You just opened up a whole new world for me haha
Are we talking about Wordfeud or is there another online Scrabble game?
No, the regular Scrabble app. There are solo games, but mostly one on one games with strangers. And a speed competition more in keeping with real life play.
EA originally owned it. I bought it for $5 back on the first iPhone. Limited to banner ads. Then it died, because it was sold. Now it’s ScrabbleGO. The same with some eyeroll garbage for collecting new tile skins and a store for new skins and some pay to play. If that wasn’t bad enough, every time you take a turn, an ad plays after. Banners included as well. It’s unplayable in its current state.
The closest approximation would be words with friends. Also riddled with ads, triggered to play every 1-2 turns. Also unplayable. Also in addition to banner ads.
Scrabble is officially dead outside of real life play on a physical board. Which makes me sad. Real life play almost no one plays defensively so it’s just aggravating.
You can use DNSNet for system wide adblocking on Android, it could make Scrabble playable again.
Here's a thing about LLMs, they will effectively make laws like this meaningless. Law comes in to enforce against a company building a program to block ads, extension goes off market. Someone asks their LLM "create an extension function referencing the same data set for my browser that performs the same function" boom new extension with no central point of distribution. Share the prompt on a forum, now everyone has a custom ad blocker. Or not so far down the road, LLM is directly built into the browser, no extension needed just prompt "do not display known advertisements on pages I request before loading, but perform background activity which gives feedback to the site that ads have loaded" boom done.
In a way, local LLMs are like distributed applications, they make enforcement against specific program functions pretty much impossible.
Example 624994931# for who bourgeois "democracies" are really protecting
I've never been blocking ads of Axel Springer, because I've been blocking all of their rotten publications. Get bent, you assholes.
Yeah for anyone who doesn't know them, this is basically the fox news of Germany. WELT, BILD, and NIUS are the biggest publications I believe and if you see them please don't even dignify them with a read or watch.
"I've seen dead fish refuse to get wrapped in yesterday's BILD"
Max Goldt
I would say it's the Rupert Murdoch of Germany, but potato / potato.
I was unfamiliar. I will keep that in mind going forward.
What's next? Forcing people to buy articles in the supermarket? Forcing people to go to the cinema? Why is copyright law even applicable here??
Loosely defined legal terms. A "computer program" can be copyrighted. You can write your own that does the same thing but you cannot copy the other code and slap your label on it. With a lot of imagination and bending the words of the shitty outdated law, you could say a website is also a "computer program." You cannot just go into the code and change it, e.g. by blocking ads. The lower court ruling didn't take this possible interpretation into account and now has to rule again with this in mind. Nothing's been decided yet. We're running a little hot in this thread on misleading headlines.
So they're gonna reign in the data brokers and surveillance capitalists? Right?
Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean "privacy".
You'd hope...but no
No the didnt... but its still bad.
wait, you're right. this is why I shouldn't change titles
Thanks for the fix :)
It’s time to abandon the internet and build a new one from scratch.
Tor? I2p?
You can go there and go whatever you want. You only need good opsec.
not from scratch but using current infrastructure in a way that makes disrupting it suicide for the corporate internet.
You would be building it on pretty much the same legal foundations. So it will just be history repeating.
In a very general sense it is, the ads should pay for the content. But fuck them because even paid services add ads. And paying for Internet access, you can't tell me what I can and can't block. Good luck proving people are blocking ads at the DNS level.
Wow, that's pretty crazy.
@saddetectiveman Nah, come on — Springer is claiming that a website is a computer program.
But that's not quite accurate.
HTML and CSS aren't computer programs - they're markup/style sheet languages. They define structure and appearance but don’t perform computation or logic. JavaScript, is a programming language and can make a website behave like a program. The same goes for server-side technologies like PHP.
However, what Adblockers typically do is prevent certain resources from loading. They don't modify the underlying program logic itself - they're just manipulating the DOM or blocking elements before they render. So in many cases, we're not interfering with a "program" in the traditional sense, but rather adjusting the output or content that gets displayed.
they're just manipulating the DOM
Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it's a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it's not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it's made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with... no, it does not actually object to anything...
And so is closing your eyes or getting up to go to the toilet.
And the rest of the world ruled that piracy is officially cool again.
axel springer: does our content suck? no, no... it's the kids who are wrong
always was 😎
Read in German
Jarrrr
Hah! Aaahahah, fuck you, German Court!
Data that arrives in the browser is downloaded and processed there.
In a newspaper, I could ask someone to cut out the advertisements before I read them. Or not?