German publisher Axel Springer, owner of brands including Bild and Die Welt, has been given another opportunity to have ad blocking outlawed on copyright grounds. After a series of defeats in its years-long legal action against the makers of Adblock Plus, the publisher appealed to the Federal Court of Justice. Germany’s top court has now overturned a 2023 ruling by the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg, referring the case back for reconsideration of the core issues.
I don’t get the problem with these anti-adblock ppl here.
- The web-server is under their control. They can, if they want to: not serve the content if the user decides to block the ad.
- The computer is under the control of the user and the user decides what they consider to be malware and what they don’t.
- If the user considers a website that pops up a colour chooser or a calculator to be a malicious website, they should have the right to block that particular website.
- If the user considers any random website to be a malicious website, they get the right to block that website on their own personal internet connected machine.
And if blocking ads is considered illegal, then ignoring robots.txt is also illegal.
I don’t use ad blockers, but I do use website blockers.
If I consider any site to be doing something I don’t like, I just add them to the blacklist, regardless of whether or not they are an advertisement site.The intent of what’s being done is legal harassment.
Why didn’t I think of that before.
Now I can imagine someone from Google and others giving them a bump for it.
I decide how I view any site, hence modifying it on my side, including blocking ads, is perfectly legitimate.
Protecting web pages under the software/writing protection law is wrong. The software is the web-browser, the page is a medium, like paper is. There is rights protection for the text, there are patents for the ideas, but there is nothing protecting the paper, nor there is for the web page.
