No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers A recent ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has reopened the possibility that using ad blocking software could violate copyright law in Germany. In a decision last month, the BGH – the final court of appeals on civil and criminal matters – partially overturned an appeals court decision in an 11-year legal …
They would be very happy with that as a solution. Then they can just return a "In order to view this site you must disable your adblocker - this site is funded by advertising. Alternatively, to pay for access, subscribe here" message as a response. There's already a whole cat and mouse about detecting ad blocking going on.
I block certain domains on my firewall on my phone because in the past I have been the recipient of a malicious ad which came from one of those domains. I also use NoScript but I don’t run an adblocker but I still get told by certain sites that I’m running one because of my other settings/addons. I’m not modifying anything as far as I can see.
Nobody forces them to give me contents for free. Still, they should not be able to lift data stealthy by the use of unwelcomed javascript. Once again, the problem are not the ads themselves - it's the code they run on remote machines without permission. Someone should counter with a suit about it.
Display me simple images and I have little to complain, just like it was in printed magazines.
I tend to take a radical position on this under copyright law:
My life is a performance before God, and so by the Geneva Copyright Treaty is protected. But tracking me is making anm unauthorized copy of that performance, hence is copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs here come to the Court with extremely dirty hands.
I dislike ads, but if you are supporting free content with ads then i suppose it is a fair deal - I don't have to access the site, and I have no god given right to do so.
HOWEVER, it is completly wrong that anyone should be tracking, monitoring or stealing my private details at all, and particularly as the price of me accessing a web site. This should be totaly banned regardless of whether I have "given my permmision" via some convoluted processes or not. You would not need ad blockers but you would have more paywalls and a more straight forward ad supported site model.
No matter where they come from.
Any ads served to me on my IT kit WILL NOT RESULT IN A SALE. If anything, it might make me buy from a competitor.
As the object of an advert is to make me want to buy the item or service being advertised, I wish that there was a way to tell an ad slinger that they are wasting their time sending me ads.
As a male in my 8th decade on this planet, why would I be interested in any womens hair/skin care product? I'm not. The same goes for feminine hygene products.
Ad slingers can go suck themselves off.
Maybe they can make it so Firefox etc. can't offer ad blockers in their downloadable extensions in Germany, but what about people manually installing them? Is Firefox itself supposed to recognize what extensions are ad blockers and block them?
I can't imagine Google would be at all unhappy about this development though - they're doing their best to make it so Chrome users worldwide can't install ad blockers! They might say "we treat the EU as a block so the German ban will apply to all EU countries" lol
Even more when the majority of the time on a page is spent trying to find the actual content in between all the fucking ads. Whoever implements any ad that changes the layout of the page as the page is scrolled needs to be boiled alive, while being shown adverts for something they only need one of and bought one last week, and to have these ads cover all instructions for escape.
I installed Firefox Focus on my phone. It's set to block ad trackers, analytics trackers, social trackers, other content trackers, web fonts, JavaScript and cookies.
It even lets me read newspaper sites with neither advertisements nor a subscription, as the GDPR says is my right.
But do you see the browser lag and CPU usage? I certainly do, which is why I run my primary browser with NoScript and only switch to a Firefox fork or Firefox itself without NoScript when a site otherwise breaks completely. (Or just skip that site, but all too often that's not a viable option.)
If Google et al were to inject an ad into the page this would be modifying the page would it not?
The publisher may have created some code to facilitate Google, but non the less Google is adding to the published document in a way not controled by the publisher.
...and that page is being displayed in a browser on your computer, so by doing so, are Google not gaining unauthorised access to your computer? An offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Surely all advertising should be strictly opt-in, to establish consent from the user?
So, if an adblocker is "not legal" because it "modifies" the DOM, then using NoScript must be completely illegal because it prevents software referenced in the DOM to execute on my computer.
Next they will be telling me that I need to execute program X and program Y because not doing so would be illegal? Who the fuck do they think they are?
I don't get that argument. NoScript just refuses the execution of code on your machine, it does not alter the websites source code, which was the point here.
Not that I agree with them....
The Springer group is... interesting....
(and ad slingers can get parodied in Minecraft)
Ad blockers do not alter the websites source code. They may alter the code the website has offered you to run, but the code on the website remains the same. (The next visitor won't see any difference).
Mainly though, they manipulate the DOM, which is the result of running the code supplied by the website.
What happens if I write a new browser and it doesn't render content exactly as intended, is that infringing too??
Their logic is so dumb, it's hard to believe.
It's like buying a physical book, and being told that you can't write notes on it as that is altering a copyrighted work.
WTF? You aren't altering the source site, and you aren't republishing - you're choosing how to process data on your own computer!
""Can't use a local hosts list for DNS redirection to 127.0.0.1 either I guess!""
Is this /sarc or not?
If not, continue reading.
Why can't you, I have about 130K of shit, garbage, crap sites in my Host file and it works pretty good!
I don't even run an ad blocker just for this reason, YMMV, if so it's time to get a new vehicle.
.............OK, now I get your drift.
I would love to see the court try some crap like that.
The HOST file was built as the base root of the communcation ability of ARPANET and has been part of it forever. Even though DNS has taken over, the job of the HOST file is still in use today for redirecting comms to where they're needed/wanted.
Have a nice day.
An adblocker could be said to be dialing down and suppressing a portion of a website.
So twiddling the treble and bass knobs on my stereo which is playing my favourite record or casette is also by implication modifying the copyrighted music and also and infringement of copyright?
Heck, listening to it on a different DAC (or analogue source)/preamp/poweramp/speaker combo from the engineer would be a modification, to say nothing of said equipment being in a different room or with a different placement. I also hope you have roughly the same body type and sit in the same place as the audio engineer.
You can put whatever you want in a web page.
It's MY decision on which bits I want to actually look at.
I suppose the argument is if they're rendered then you can choose to look at them or not. If they're not rendered that's not a choice you're making. You're blanket refusing to engage with any advertising; yet still taking the product it pays for.
I'll be honest, it leaves me conflicted. I'm viewing this webpage through a browser with ublock, which is also on a piHole filtered internet connection. I avoid as many adverts as I can.
However, I'm also the generation that seems to expect everything for free, so I do understand that content providers do need to pay for things somehow. I'm well aware I'm reading The Register, a site I enjoy and use a lot, but also actively choosing to deprive the site of some revenue. This is quite conflicting; but there doesn't seem, yet, to be a better way to fund stuff like this. (and the other day I had to re-set things up, and was without piHole for a bit... oh my... my eyes!!)
My main fear is ad blocking is increasingly hurting the smaller players that can't afford to either say 'pay or fuck off', or can circumvent a lot of it (like Youtube on anything that isn't a browser). But, as I detest the advertising on the internet I'll continue to be a hypocrite.
Mind you, I do wonder if I ever set up a business how I'll tell people about it?
You're conflating 2 different issues.
The issue here is about whether it's illegal to manipulate something on your own computer. That is no different to writing on a book you own, or as someone else mentioned, altering the bass or treble on a CD you're playing, and is a ridiculous argument.
..or, tearing out the pages I disagree with, or at least taking a scalpel to remove offending/uninteresting elements on the page, or simply wielding my trusty redaction marker. The copyright holder has no authority to deny me the freedom to 'vandalise' their work, so long as I am not then monetising it, or presenting it under false pretences.
The fact is that if anyone wants to put their stuff out there online, with the intention of making money, that's their choice. And as long as the recipient isn't effectively 'stealing' that content, i.e. depriving the originator of income whilst making money on it themselves, then what the recipient does with the content 'in private' really isn't any of the originator's business. As far as I am aware the advertiser's 'right' does not include the right to compel the receiver to interact with the advertisement, and if the advert is a hindrance to the receiver's needs the receiver has every right to remove the hindrance.
Otherwise, where does it end. Well it ends, I guess, pretty much where we seem to be heading: "'Your' machine, is actually 'our' machine, and you can only do with it, and with the code it runs, what we licence you to do. Of course that requires subscription payments, plus per use additional fees—we have to put food on the table, after all."
The publishers are trying to conflate local modification of content (notes in the margin) with alteration then republishing. Neat trick.
This is nonsense, as each ad-stripped instance was generated locally. It may be that Eyeo is actually doing some processing in the cloud, so fall afoul of the republishing test.
Of course, the case would then be applied to all adblockers.
It may be that Eyeo is actually doing some processing in the cloud, so fall afoul of the republishing test.
Even this probably won't fly in the circumstances IF the ' doing some processing in the cloud' happens only through 'my' instruction and only affects 'my' view, i.e. the 'cloud' aspect is irrelevant in this case because the modification only occurs through my initiative and only applies to material I am accessing—there is no 'republishing'.
You're blanket refusing to engage with any advertising; yet still taking the product it pays for.
The website owner may very well have an agreement to serve up ads in return for revenue. This is an agreement between the website owner and the ad-slinger, and I am not party to it. If the owner of the website decides that I have some sort of duty to honour their agreement with a third party, then they are sadly mistaken.
If someone paid me to shout obscenities in your face, you'd be under no obligation to listen, and would be quite within your rights to try to avoid this situation. It is simply a matter of degree.
Proactively deciding to not render them in the first place still *is* a choice I'm making, it's just a choice I've made prior to even visiting the webpage vs one I'm making dynamically based on whatever level of ad-driven hell said page tries to then foist on me.
And I'm from a generation where we were happy to pay for our news and whatnot, because that was the only way we could access it in the days before the internet came along. I'm therefore *also* from a generation which still remembers how nice and friendly the web used to be in those early days, when site creators made their stuff genuinely available for free because the idea of trying to monetise every last byte of data you send to someone reading your page simply wasn't a thing. And even when ads did then start to emerge, they were generally still fairly benign, with the worst offenders simply being animGIFs that were a bit visually intrusive compared with the static images that mostly comprised the world of online advertising back then.
Where the rot started was when site owners started getting greedy, and putting in more effort on maximising engagement with ads and the resultant revenue they earned, because visiting a webpage that has a subtle set of ads nicely integrated into the overall page design is one thing, visiting one where the actual page content is essentially unreadable because of the barrage of ad content you have to wade through first is quite another.
So I have no sympathy for those on the side of the advertisers these days, and especially not the big names like Axel Springer who are by far and away the worst offenders when it comes to wanting to monetise every single interaction someone has with them, and in turn have the resources behind them to then pull stupid legal moves like this one.
And I especially have no sympathy for anyone who, in the process of trying to defend their right to sling ads at people, attack the problem not with a surgical strike on adblockers specifically, but start slinging strategic nukes at the problem with the very real risk of wiping out all manner of other client-side page adjustments which have nothing at all to do with adblocking. Because the second you manage to secure a ruling that says page content can't be modified by the reader, it doesn't just make adblockers illegal, it would potentially affect *anything* which relies on modifying the content in some way regardless of the reasons why those modifications were being made.
THIS! Exactly!
I never used an ad blocker until my sibling complained that their laptop was extremely slow.
The first thing I looked at was the Windows Run registry but I could not view it even as administrator so I knew it was a virus.
After making a raw disk image of the hard drive using dd from a Linux live disk I ran the disk image through the excellent “Autopsy” program and found the exact date and time down to the millisecond of infection.
My sibling was served a malicious ad from a well known and respected news website that installed a fileless rootkit.
Now I use ublock origin and never enable JavaScript unless I’m logging into a site and also use a Pi Hole with over 400k websites blocked and counting.
And just a few days ago I tried downloading wireshark to a Windows test machine but I could not view the downloads.
It opened several browser tabs trying to get past it.
Looking at wireshark website source showed it was running a full page ad for their certification but my PiHole or must have made the button to get past it fail so I used the “zapper” tool in ublock to make the page disappear so I could download the executable.
Viewing source, blocking ads and zapping elements would all be illegal if this BS law were to pass.
I use it to block code. Having had a machine compromised by a malicious ad, I'm not eager to repeat the experience!
Make your ads static pictures (and ideally served from the domain that I'm actually visiting), and I wouldn't mind. Ads don't bother me. But stop running who-knows-whose code on my machine!
I bet if you ask anyone running a website that relies on adverts if they have vetted the adverts code to insure that nobody gets pwned due to their website, I bet 99% will have that same look the deer has before you run him over... better yet ask them how often, badum tiss!
And on the plus side: neither the ad blocker nor NoScript would remove those ads....
So they are just lazy sods for not serving sensible ads.
Hell, make them relevant! Trying to push me to buying a new dishwasher makes no sense when I'm looking at a discussion about failing server hardware. "Ooh, this is an IT rag, you are looking at servers - maybe you want a new machine or a geeky toy?" could actually work, you know....
Three months ago I was researching a gpu for transcoding on my plex server. I'm still getting unwanted ads after buying the gpu, or at least I was until I set up pi-hole on an old PC I had laying around. They say ignorance is bliss. I'm now living a blissful life, ad free.
No, I'm not interested in an air fryer, a Toyota, Nissan, Ford, or any other cars. They can keep their 2 screen ads that randomly rearrange the text I'm actually trying to engage in.
This is a great point. The way that most ads are served, they aren't really part of the main website, so they shouldn't be considered part of a copyrightable design. Ad blockers don't alter the main website's code, they just block requests to known advert domains.
Well, it's a valid point, but it's not great, because it shouldn't be relevant.
Even if the image was served off the same domain, how can they legally make you show it? Would it also be illegal to change the colour scheme on a website, or the font size?
I used to have a monitor whose colours were out of wack, but there is a chrome extension I used that made the whole page black and white. Under their logic, this software would be illegal. Hell, I guess my monitor would have been illegal too as it didn't render the page as they expected!
Blocking stuff that slows down the page, slows down navigation (pop ups, pop overs etc.) and so forth. I never browse without an ad blocker, but I get glimpses of what the web is really like if I follow a link in Facebook. The Facebook app uses its own browser that does not use the iOS system setting for ad blocker (big shock, I know) and the amount of crap I see even on reputable sites is crazy! As a result I will almost always use the "open in browser" option to open them in Safari which uses my adblocker setting and the difference is night and day.
I wonder how much my use of the internet would decrease if I was forced to use it without any ad blocker. I'm sure by much more than half!
I imagine the fact I'm browsing with Firefox on Linux makes me less worried about malware, since it isn't going to be written to target me. Chrome or Edge on Windows would be what they're going after.
If I was asked to accept - and pay for - the delivery of an un-franked letter which contained marketing, I would unhestiatingly refuse it.
Similarly, were I contacted by my phone company and asked to accept a collect call that was some kind of marketing, I would refuse it. I might actually get somewhat forthright.
So why do online advert pushers, expect me to spaff my data allowance and paid-for data and my time, just to download marketing?
People engaged in internet marketing used to bleat that ad-blocking equated to theft. I suggest the opposite: internet advertising is theft.
>Look it up
Seems that theft by conversion remains a thing in the US, perhaps, but was swept away by the UK Theft Act 1968. Lord Stonham, in moving the second reading said
In the hope of avoiding what would otherwise be an intolerably long speech, I propose to deal only with the more important provisions of the Bill and explain the thinking and policy behind them. Clauses 1 to 7 deal with the new offence of theft, which will replace the existing offences of embezzlement, fraudulent conversion, and the twenty or so different varieties of larceny.
The Theft Act modified acres of previous legislation, including some going back to 1275.
People engaged in internet marketing used to bleat that ad-blocking equated to theft. I suggest the opposite: internet advertising is theft.
They didn't suggest to you yet that you "can have the full, ad-free, upgraded quality service for only XX of your finest British Pounds per month?"
(Why did I have to think of this nice Black Mirror one with the IT Crowds Chris O'Dowd?)
If I was asked to accept - and pay for - the delivery of an un-franked letter which contained marketing, I would unhestiatingly refuse it.
I assume you always used to turn off your TV in the ad breaks? (I mean you'd still be paying for the service at that point, not the electricity though).
So why do online advert pushers, expect me to spaff my data allowance and paid-for data and my time, just to download marketing?
Because the online content you view needs to be paid for.
The issue here is mobile providers are still charging for data as it's a nice revenue generator. Hopefully it'll go the way of fixed line data caps at some point.
Watching network TV is a thing of the past for me, but we used to just channel surf (or look at the guide to see what else is on) during commercials. If other syndicated channels are timed to have commercial breaks at the same time, there's always something that doesn't. I refuse to watch advertising. I refuse to operate a web browser without blocking ads, unwanted scripts and content.
It's been said that AI-generated content is not copyrightable - because a computer made it.
Much *less* than that, how about algorithmicly generated content? That's what ad displays are. They vary depending on the bidder at the time; no creative thought goes into it whatsoever.
Why is this "discussion" given serious consideration at all?
Much what I was coming to say. The website designer/IP owner has not selected a specific ad to play in each slot so they cannot say that blocking anything from displaying in each slot is any different from a particular slot not getting picked up by an advertiser and while that is not a likely scenario it is theoretically possible.
The website is displaying AS DESIGNED BY THE OWNER, it is the extra cruft from 3rd parties which is not happening.
My eyes flick over a page or block of text in a magazine as soon as I've clocked its identity and categorised it as "ad". I'm not modifying the magazine by refusing to read the text, I'm ignoring it.
Pihole does the same.
If your business model consists of identifying ads and substituting some other content you curate yourself and get paid to distribute, you're modifying it. Also, you're just another pitiful rent-seeking parasite.
Back in the day, when I still read the trade press printed on dead trees, I would flip through a new magazine and find all the pages that were adverts on both sides and rip them out. The ones on coated stock went into the recycle bin (Palo Alto recycled coated stock a lot earlier than most cities), and the ones on newsprint went into the fire-starter pile. The fly-in postcards got dumped into the fire starter pile. I didn't actually register what the ads were all about. Only took a couple minutes per magazine, and was definitely worth it.
Today we're in the computer age, so I let the computer handle it for me. Seems like the sensible thing to do.
Dryer lint in egg cartons topped up with a little wax. Pull off one egg cup, light it, add kindling and then bigger pieces and finally logs. Simples.
If that's too low-tech for you, a propane torch usually marketed as a weed-burner works well.
Or do it the was they taught you in scouts.
Are scouts still allowed to play with fire, or is it deemed too dangerous for children?
Before Adblock and uBlock, I used Privoxy, Internet Junkbuster before that, and null-routing in the hosts file before that. In fact I still do use DNS66 on Android to prevent apps loading ads.
I can tell you, you don't want to go back to that. Ad blocking browser extensions do a much better job with better performance, less site breakage, and less effort from you. Publishers are privy to domain blocking, and work around it by intermingling their ads with normal site images, use obtuse file/path naming to prevent easily singling out their ads, and can even proxy connections to other domains through their own server.
The solution, if German courts make the wrong decision here, is just integrating ad blocking into web browsers... Then it's unambiguously a setting in the browser deciding not to fetch or display certain elements, rather being arguably any modification of the website's copyrighted code. No more intrusive than changing your web browser's font settings...
Reading the judgement, it's sounds like a formal request for the appeals court to provide a more thorough justification that a website should not be considered software, and whether changes to the DOM or rendering be considered akin to hacking. Even if this approach is upheld, which I think any expert testimony would debunk: the specification for HTML and CSS leave the ultimate decision over rendering to the user.
It's also somewhat redundant, I think as more and more German websites are saying – accept our cookies or pay to read further. This is easily avoided by using a stateless browser.
I think the pertinent point here, is that it would only be hacking if it was an attempt to modify the code on the provider's servers, and I think the argument that what you have running in your browser on your computer is somehow someone else's protected property is more than a little thin...
Websites don't supply ads, they merely rent space on your desktop. Thus space is leased to brokers who use the facilities and any information they can glean about you to auction your space to an advert provider. So, put simply, the websites don't supply adverts, some other third parties do, and i feel fully entitled to block them.
But I don't really need to. Some fly-by-night service provider -- "Powered by Admiral" -- thinks I have an ad blocker running on my system when I don't (I don't have just one system or one browser, BTW). They've obviously got a first class marketing operation which obviously substitutes for some actual engineering. I have no idea how this would fare in The Fatherland but since any site that presents me with a pop-up blathering on about ad-blockers is subsequently ignored I don't think it will be an issue.
FWIW -- I never click on stuff, never have, never will do. Its inviting malware. If I want to find out what's on a site I'll pull the URL and go there manually.
However, online advertising is also one of the primary ways that publishers pay their bills. Ad blockers prevent those publishers from earning the revenue they may need to stay in business.
It's not a crime that I do something that happens to not help your business model succeed. Down that road lies outlawing bicycles to improve Volkswagen's sales and restricting the size of kitchens in private homes to ensure people will go out to eat at restaurants more frequently.
As a UK person, the town of Hay on Wye is renowned as full of bookshops - the book capital of the UK.
However, I had a very depressing experience there, one plavce I wandered to had people devoted to just that (not an original millions of £ value BoA* obviously) but were cannibalizing illustrations from a variety of books & framing them for sale.
* I have had the pleasure of seeing an original** (the Portland copy, before Welbeck estate sold it off for millions, requested via UK tax exempt art scheme which lets us plebs look at art that the owners are saving tax on). I have a (decent sized but not double elephant) modern version, & would not be surprised if people chopped up those for prints.
** did not get to touch it, a gloved staff member did the opening, page turning etc.
Well, the auhtor may hold the copyright, so....
But following that reasoning, I shouldn't skip chapters in a book, tracks in an album, or scenes in a movie because it would be a "copyrigt violations"? I have to read/listend/watch what I don't like? Sure, those contents are still there - but what if an ad blocker simply comments out code I don't want to run?
Shouldn't I re-bound a broken book bacause it would be again a copyright violation?
And - are ever-changing ads and externally-sourced javascript inestricable parts of the copyrighted work? Does the fair-use doctrice cover the ads removal?
And since the author holds copyright, doesn't that mean that inserting ads onto the author's copyrighted material is itself copyright infringement?
...and don't claim that the ad-company owns the material: assignment of copyright is very strict: see https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf:
"...Any or all of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, or parts of those rights, can be transferred. The
transfer, however, generally must be made in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed
or the owner’s authorized agent..."
I remember browsers had (still have?) the capability of overriding the site's style sheet(s) with a user specified stylesheet to increase accessibility eg permit a visually impaired user to increase the font sizes of text elements and the colour contrast between elements.
I remember using this feature ~20 years ago to access a site hosting some SIlicon Graphics material which used dark brown text on a black background. While not visually impaired at that time I could not read the text.
Presumably DE and EU have regulation and legislation mandating certain accessibility requirement for web sites which, even if in practice are largely ignored, would conflict with the Axel Springer claim.
Ultimately the contention is that the publisher can mandate through the courts which browser(s) you were permitted to use to view their material.
If the case were against a company offering a proxy service that stripped advertising from the source site's pages then this horse might have legs but as it stands† it is attempting to nail legs on to a dead horse.
† the case (not the legless horse)
Ultimately the contention is that the publisher can mandate through the courts which browser(s) you were permitted to use to view their material.
By extension, the user-agent request header must also be a work of copyright, otherwise it would be trivial to override it with "adslinger/shitehawk" or whatever they want to call their browser.
Will we be banned from making alterations to branded clothing next, if we need to turn up the legs a bit?
Legally disenfranchise us enough and the only defence we will have will be hate. To hate the publisher Axel Springer, boycotting their products.
Ditto for GAFA and MS. There is little love for them on this board. Sadly too many people will swallow their ethics and work for them. Everyone needs to make a living, but think twice before going over to the dark side of the force.
The whole internet is just a fucking adfest. Back in the days before the Internet, when the Bulletin Board System (BBS) was in its heyday on dial-up, it was fine. Mainly geeks and educational establishments. Then businesses got involved, and even then I remember comments that it would all end up in tears. It won't be long before the internet will choke itself to death and the sooner the better. What with adverts and government censorship/control, George Orwell's 1984 is almost upon us, if not already.
The Motorcycle News website recently changed to detect ad blocking and now shows me a blank page with a 'disable your blocker' banner. So, out of curiosity, I tried it. My Lord. The resulting page was spattered with completely unrelated adverts. Banner adverts that cover the actual page text (you have to scroll the page to move them) and even a picture of an attractive young lady - no text but I suspect I'd end up on some kind of dating site if I clicked it. PiHole reported that my computer had been rate-limited because there were over one thousand requests submitted just to deliver the MCN home page. PiHole got re-enabled quickly after that.
If they delivered a page with a couple of relevant ads embedded (from their own domain and under their control), I'd have no issue. After all, at some point, I'll want bike insurance or new tires - but flooding me with unrelated crap and making the whole experience so deeply unpleasant convinced me not to bother with the entire publication any more.
Stopping adverts from showing might be ruled illegal? Next court case: a fine if you can't prove you carefully read the entire advert and jail time for people that don't immediately buy something the ad-slingers are promoting?
If they delivered a page with a couple of relevant ads embedded (from their own domain and under their control), I'd have no issue. After all, at some point, I'll want bike insurance or new tires - but flooding me with unrelated crap and making the whole experience so deeply unpleasant convinced me not to bother with the entire publication any more.
This. Back in the good'ol days I could buy a bike mag to read on the train. It had articles about bike stuff, and ads for bikes, gear, services and generally relevant to bikers. The business was simple, bikers and would-be bikers are going to buy and read the mag, advertisers knew this so wouldn't waste money. Or repeatedly serve a 30s Twix ad about two bros and their factory. And the magazine ads didn't prevent me from turning the page until the ad finished. Or my other favorite, intersperse the Twix ads with attempts to convince me to take a train from London to Manchester. I didn't live in London, I'd expressed no desire to visit Manchester. This was probably over a decade ago, and I still remember those ads just because they were so frequent and so annoying.. And it went as far as making me avoid buying Twix ever since.
Which is the bit I don't get. We're told that online algorithms use sophisticated analytics to match ads to consumers.. Yet it clearly doesn't work and we're bombarded with irrelevant carp instead. Advertisers waste money, consumers turn to ad blockers and sites that rely on advertising lose revenue. If ads were relevant, they'd be far less annoying. If they're not relevant, then perhaps ad slingers should be barred from scraping every scrap of PII they can get their grubby mitts on because that scraping clearly doesn't serve any legitimate purpose defined in things like GDPR or DPA. And there's other brain-dead stuff, like the dreaded unskippable ads. If they're not relevant or wanted, they're just going to annoy people. If they were skipped, that would be an indication of disnterest, so advertisers could save money. There's also been other stuff that should probably fall foul of the Computer Misuse Act, so I remember the dreaded Flash ads that would unmute and max out volume. Stuff like that is an unauthorised modification of my device config or settings.
And the strangest thing to me is that the bulk ad-slingers like AlphaGoo or MS, or any sites they 'serve' don't try to ask me about what stuff I might be interested in. There were signs that advertisers were starting to realise their online ad spend was being wasted, but nothing seems to have improved.
So, if I graffiti my reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, I am infringing the Louvre's copyright?
If I annotate a recipe in my copy of a popular cookbook, I am infringing the chef's copyright?
I thought judges this stupid were Only In America (and the UK). Shame on you, Germany, for sinking to our level!
To clarify: Lynx does not implement the DOM, it parses the raw HTML like an interpreter, such as a command shell, and modifies the tags for display in said shell. OMG! It modifies the tags! Copyright alert! But not in the DOM, so breathe easy until the next ignoramus gets appointed to the judiciary.
To be more precise: Axel Springer seems to claim that modifying the DOM infringes on its copyright. But Axel Springer isn't the author of the DOM. Axel Springer authors, and its web servers transmit, HTML code. The DOM is constructed at the receiving end. By convention, a modern web browser builds the DOM out of the HTML it receives, as an intermediary stage before rendering the web page to the screen. Again by convention, this intermediary stage is where the client side scripting takes place. The ridiculousness of Axel Springer's claim is made evident by good old Lynx, the browser that renders web pages without even being aware of any DOM.
So I can see why some company may not like ad blockers.
But copyright infringement? What a nonsense argument.
* The web site serves the content up to anyone who requests it and at that point the web server is making a copy.
* Ad blocker apparently modifies the DOM. It's not firing off a copy of that DOM, no copy distributed so no copyright infringement.
User stylesheets have been a thing since day one of CSS. And display:none doesn't modify the DOM. The DOM is still there intact, inside the browser.
But even supposing adding CSS is lllegal as well, that wouldn't seem to prevent filtering at the "network level" - ideally inside the browser or, worst case, using hosts file/firewall/etc. to block the sites. (Although when you can't see the URL, it has a more limited functionality)
This decision is similar to saying that if I rip up a newspaper or fill in all the Os and Qs in a book then I am breaching copyright.
I have acquired the material legitimately, if I then choose to mutilate it that is up to me. I am not re-publishing th e mutilated material, just keeping it for my own use.
This post has been deleted by its author
Advertisers demanding users' eyelids be taped open, otherwise it might breach copyright of a website? Or, if a user's eyesight is faulty, and they misread something on a website, does that mean they breached copyright? Will the website owner pay for their new glasses?
What utter bullshit.
If this gets up, I suggest a global boycott of any products or services associated with Axel Springer and his regular advertisers.
In case you want to get started on that boycott early, you can see Axel Springer's products and services on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE
People used to panic whenever a bunch of pop-ups and then pop-unders would suddenly show up. It would be indicative of a virus that had abused your computer's rendering of a page via exploit already released (it really wasn't called "in the wild" over 20 years ago) and infecting you, or via a virus that easily bypassed your antivirus at the time, before browser processes started getting sandboxed
Of course in an office setting we used to make fun of people who would inevitably get fired because illicit porn from dodgy sites was usually the cause of such a breach.
Nowadays, the damned website operators themselves are now the offenders of such ghastly placements of ads all over the damn place, where tapping the X half the time STILL launches the offending link. They use gimmicks that subvert the toggling off of pop-ups that even Google and Edge have in the browser by using a full-screen layer forcing you to tap an X/Close anyway to read content.
Web beacons. "Invisible pixels". "Essential" cookies that are required.
So who really is breaking MY computer's/phone's access to browse the Internet in a sane manner? Now we're expected to accept a flurry of ads that look like a virus from 2000 has infiltrated your device?
"it really wasn't called "in the wild" over 20 years ago"
Joe Wells established The WildList in 1993. We had been talking about miscellaneous malware being in the wild (as opposed to being lab only) for at least two decades at that point. (Some dipshit managed to unleash a variation of Creeper on the PDP10 kit at Berkeley and Stanford in early 1973. It was only "in the wild" for a couple hours late Saturday night into Sunday morning. My report on cleaning it up contained the words "in the wild".)
They are arguing about whether using an ad blocker is copyright infringement, yet no doubt their entire website has now been injected by all the AI companies LLM and their content is getting served up by chat bots without anyone seeing their ads.
They need to drop this ridiculous law suit and go after the real enemy of content creators, those AI companies who are taking content without permission or compensation.
Instead of going so hard on adblockers, how about regulating the types, amount, and placements of those ads??? Nevermind tracking and all that tosh; simply who the fck wants an article where every paragraph is broken up by an ad in the middle, with the site having an overlay pull-up or pull-down as well that covers most of it and can't even be dismissed with a single click, and with a video playing in a thumbnail in a corner?? All that alone is absolutely bonkers, without even dragging the tracking argument in. One can be "blind" to ads as much as they want, the inconvenience can't be circumvented, no matter the ignorance to their content.
Remove dodge software from unknown sources claiming to be "adverts"
Regain cpu cycles and free ram taken up by the above.
Make my pc environmentally friendly, recycling those bits.
Protect my pc from malware
Protect my pc from viruses.
Protect my child from adult content.
Protect my self from distractions.
Protect my sanity from countless distractions.
So can I just not call it a software protection suite and carry on as before?
I think their argument is tenuous at best. Copyright holders don't have any control over what happens to the material once it's been distributed. They can't stop you tearing out pages of the copyrighted book they've sold you, or scribbling in the margins. The moment the material lands on your computer, it's yours to do what you want with.
The markup is the info, the styling is a suggested way of rendering it, depending also on the device, the (sadly) omnipresent Javascript is also optional (many sites work even without it).
Altering the way the information is presented (or not) on the client side is one of the main point of HTML/browser/websites. Sure, now we have those stupid websites that must have JS on because 'special effects', but how is disabling JS or blocking some domains a violation of copyright?
Imagine a book publisher suing people because they read books in a Duffy Duck's voice, or skip a sentence here and there. Indeed skipping a sentence make 'your version ' of the book very similar to the copyrighted one, so you gotta pay royalties!!!1!1
Popups are very annoying, moving ones terrible and distracting, noisy ones infuriating.
Banner ads are fine and in the right place I welcome them.
Why?
In the right place, lets say a forum about a certain device, a new accessory appears, an advert is shown, you would investigate and possibly buy. This is like magazine adverts, directed and interesting.
But too many other ads are fraudulent. Reporting is useless, so block them/
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
