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.
Can someone please translate this into plain English? I do not understand what they are trying to claim. What is “in-memory execution structures” and can it be copyrightable?
Suppose that it is, I do not see the link between that and breaking copyright laws. When I receive a webpage, it is on my computer now. I can do what I want with it in the same way I can do whatever I want with a book I’ve bought, right? And in that sense, using adblock is just me coloring on the book?
Axel Springer is basically repeating the F12 == Hacking argument.
It’s annoying when plaintiffs try to use pointless jargon like “DOM and CSSOM” to fool judges instead of just saying “the content we published on the internet and delivered to the user,” and it’s even more annoying when that tactic works. Talk about potentially destroying massively basic rights by setting legal precedent in order to get some dubious short-term personal gain. Hopefully that won’t be the case here.
They can pry my adblock from my cold, dead hands before i would ever consider turning mine of, illegal or otherwise. I just finish setup nginx as DoT frontend, with bind9 as the rpz adblock filter forwarding to few vanilla upstream dns providers. Took me like 2 days to do the whole thing, dealing with docker finicky networking and stuff. Well worth it to block all the internet craps.
Tbf sueing Eyeo (company behind Adblock Pro) is probably not the worst idea. It is a terrible adblocker that allows ads through if you pay them. It is their business model to display their preferred ads, now that seems a strange way of defeating competition.
The objective seems to be quite a bit different from Ublock Origin