A big win for open Internet: Сourt sides with an ad blocker in a copyright case
eyeo, the company behind AdBlock Plus, has claimed an important victory in court. It will allow users to continue using extensions to block ads without fear of repercussions.
What URLs I load and choose not to load should always be my absolute whole discretion. And yes I can pick and choose not to load a whole website.
But don't use Adblock Plus, use uBlock. Being the gatekeeper of ads to extort money out of advertisers is still a dick move and a middleman that doesn't need to exist.
uBlock Origin, to be precise!
To expand - uBlock was sold to AdBlock, and so uses the same Acceptable Ads policy. uBlock Origin is a fork made by the original creator of uBlock.
Can’t stress this enough
Ad blockers don't even modify websites usually. Many just block web requests to certain domains and addresses. You can't force people to load stuff, that sets a dangerous precedent for protecting against malware. Glad this German court saw reason.
Yep. Even if conventional ad blocker addons get "banned" or Chrome breaks them and forces that on the world, people are just going to block it at the OS or router level.
It's really a marvellous surprise that the court in Hamburg did not make a completely stupid judgement regarding IT topics, given their history of bad decisions in that area.
Can you provide some examples of their bad decisions?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, has scored another victory in its long-running legal battle with German publisher Axel Springer.
The appeal, tossed by the Hamburg court last month, was filed by the German media conglomerate in response to the ruling from January 2022, also in favor of Eeyo.
That ruling was handed down to Axel Springer in the 2021 lawsuit, in which the publisher claimed for the first time that the HTML programming language should be protected under the German copyright law.
Before bringing up copyright claims against eyeo, Axel Springer tried a different path, accusing the Cologne-based software developer of unfair competition.
The publisher wanted not only to challenge Adblock Plus’s (admittedly questionable) practice of whitelisting certain advertisers, but also the concept of ad blocking as a whole.
This would spell doom for the idea of the open Internet as a space where people can freely develop and use new extensions and browser features to enhance their online experience.
The original article contains 546 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
If this idiocy was accepted, screen readers would be outlawed.
They know they won’t get what they’re asking for, they’re just trying to chill other Adblocking groups and kill then with legal fees
Sounds like hackivists need to get involved with Axel Springer
