Eh, next try (Nr. 7? 8?) of Axel Springer, a tabloid that wanted to declare their site as a protected piece of art you aren’t allowed to modify (block stuff).
Great, but how could they possibly enforce it? It’s infeasible.
As long as they can reduce the adblock usage, it is a win for them. 100% success is not the goal. Right now there is nothing stopping everyone from using some sort of adblocker (0% revenue is possible actually), which must be scary.
service offers a flat monthly fee to not have any ads and distributes the money to all of the content platforms that would otherwise show ads. basically it’s like a little government taxing users and giving the money to the capital owning class all over again
Another way to subsidize a very small handful of extremely large businesses that are already richer than some countries, and outright kill small actors? Sign me up.
At what point do we just redo the web? I’m thinking Gemini but with more geo cities
It should/would then also be illegal to block virus/spyware delivery, or everyone’s favorite, 50 porn window pop ups. The latter was “fixed” by browsers maybe 10 years ago.
I’m gonna modify Springer’s websites so hard, they’re gonna resemble a Picasso’s painting
I guess we shut off the fucking Internet to Germany then. 🖕🏻
Funny how this thread isn’t over-run with copyright shills standing up for the poor journalists. Maybe once the law needs to be changed?
You can make ad blockers illegal, but you can’t actually enforce it unless you have a dystopian totalitarian government with a secret police to track down anyone using one. Does Germany have that?
Working on it
Had that
longer in the eastern part
I speak German legalese (don’t ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.
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, that’s a super helpful explanation :)
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.
Insanity - modifying code that runs on your machine in no way is even remotely related to copyright.
I wouldn’t call it fair, this is a clear cut case of copyright law abuse and they shouldn’t be able to make dumb stuff up and waste everyones time. This shouldn’t even be a case.
The company is also shady: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE
Honestly, a lot of modern copyright law is very shady. You can get in major trouble for ripping a CD or DVD? That sounds insane. And what about not being allowed to repair your own tractor? Do you remember the baby dancing to some music, that was then DMCA-ed away?
My favorite is still the absolutely bonkers almost 100 years on copyrights. That has absolutely nothing to do with “the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” everything with lining the pockets of copyright holders.
Back in the 90s when the current iteration of copyright laws were being passed, many lawyers disdainfully referred to the act as the ‘Mickey Mouse Copyright Act’ In no small part because Disney was such a huge driver behind it. They did everything, and I mean EVERYTHING possible to delay the release of their IPs to public domain. There is a reason why the earliest iterations of Mickey Mouse coming out were such a big deal. Did you know that if they didn’t act like assholes back in the day, and pre-70s copyright were still in effect, Mickey and Minnie Mouse would be fully public domain as early as 1984?
German copyright laws?
That’s why I’m rooting for LLMs to destroy copyright completely. Haters gonna hate but copyright is so broken the best path forward is to completely destroy it and start over.
If what manxu said is true it might be both courts agree its clear cut. It sounds more like a pull request getting rejected because of quality issues. “Fix it and resubmit. We don’t want this happening again”
I’ve learned courts have a lot of jargon and procedures that don’t make sense on the surface. some things that sound bad actually are for your benefit and it’s best to get a lawyer to translate.
The “owners” of our world want us to be passengers, not drivers. They own the carusel, and we rent our rides.
They say we have no skin in the game. Truth is, SKIN is ALL we have in this game. We must have assets in the game as a birthright to make it worth playing in good faith. If most are landless and assetless, sorry, the game sucks. That means untill we get the rules that protect all of our interests, as opposed to protecting massive wealth accumulations at everyone’s expense, we will ignore the rules, the norms, decorum, civility, etc.
If the hoarders break the social contract repeatedly, like they have since 2008, it takes people some time to internalize and digest the fact of what it means for none of us to be bound by a social contract. Once people catch on, there will be hell to pay.
In that case, make sure the judge gets to watch 4x 10 minute ads for every 30 minutes of watching anything in 720p after having paid in full for the highest tier 4K subscription plan.
The wealthy people will just pay to have the ads removed.
As always, this law doesn’t exist to benefit workers like you and me. It exists to benefit our rulers and should be another example of how government representatives do not represent their populace.
So basically its “we get to decide how data is processed on your hardware when we send it down the pipe”. Somebody should explain server/client roles to these clowns.
I wonder how much money Google bribing Germany to make it happened ?
Bribing Merz*
I don’t know why but I feel relaxed about it. It’s hardly enforceable and I don’t even think Springer will win this. It’s just a feeling from experience with those things in Germany.
They’re also referring to browser based ad blocking which leaves blockers like pi hole or ad guard to be legal options.
Yeah this is never going to happen. Calm down people!
I just went through the comments … people are losing their shit. And as always whenever Germany is mentioned, Godwin’s Law is in full effect.
Apparently nobody remembers the very American and very similar youtube-dl takedown which ended in youtube-dl’s favor. tl;dr: website owners cannot tell people how to read their websites.DON’T PANIC nothing has happened, and it won’t for years.
