TLDR; The creators of Adblock Plus were sued by a German man named Axel Springer for cutting into his website profits. The German Federal Supreme Court had just revived this court case, potentially endangering Adblock extensions in the country.
The case stems from online media company Axel Springer’s lawsuit against Eyeo - the maker of the popular Adblock Plus browser extension.
Axel Springer says that ad blockers threaten its revenue generation model and frames website execution inside web browsers as a copyright violation.
This is grounded in the assertion that a website’s HTML/CSS is a protected computer program that an ad blocker intervenes in the in-memory execution structures (DOM, CSSOM, rendering tree), this constituting unlawful reproduction and modification.
Previously, this claim was rejected by a lower-level court in Hamburg, but a new ruling by the BGH found the earlier dismissal flawed and overturned part of the appeal, sending the case back for examination.
“It cannot be excluded that the bytecode, or the code generated from it, is protected as a computer program, and that the ad blocker, through modification or modifying reproduction, infringed the exclusive right thereto,” reads BGH’s statement (automated translation).
That make sense for local, browser adblock that modify dom like Adblock+, Ublock Origin etc but what about dns based adblock though? Those are at network level.
If enough people keep doing it they’d probably use the websites own DNS to resolve the ads as a “first party” ad. But I don’t know know enough really, that’s just a possibility that I’ve heard around bypassing ads at the DNS level.
Axel Springer died nearly 40 years ago. The eponymous company he founded, 36% owned by private equity company KKR, is the one bringing the lawsuit here.