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Using Adblock Plus to Block Ads is Legal, Rules German Court -- For the Fifth Time (arstechnica.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Using Adblock Plus to block ads on websites is legal, a German regional court has ruled. The suit, brought by the company behind the leading German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, is the fifth such case to be decided in favor of the makers of the software, who are based in Germany. The court in Munich also ruled that the "Acceptable Ads initiative," a scheme that requires larger companies to pay for their ads to be whitelisted by Adblock Plus, is acceptable under German law. "To the contrary, said the court, users have the right to block those or any ads, because no such contract exists," Adblock Plus's Ben Williams writes. "Additionally, the judge ruled that by offering publishers a way to serve ads that ad-blocking users will accept, the Acceptable Ad initiative provides them an avenue to monetize their content, and therefore is favorable, not disadvantageous, to them."
Previously, Adblock Plus's parent company Eyeo has won court cases against the German publishing giant Axel Springer, Germany television companies Pro 7/Sat 1 and RTL Interactive, and against the companies operating the Zeit Online and Handelsblatt websites.
That's why I stopped using Adblock Plus.
When Google did their unified login, and unified privacy policy, that was the point I started blocking adverts. You watch something on YouTube, or visit a shopping site, and you get served up ads for that product where-ever you go. "Do not track" is ignored.
Adverts became privacy invasions, and they are easy to block, so I block them. IMHO Firefox's new "block tracking items" is one of few new features in Firefox that are the right choice.
And Android is worse, a unique ID sent to Google all the time so it can track you. It's claimed to be anonymous, but its trivial for them to link it to a real identity. And its sent whether you opt in to personalized ads or not.
Why should I watch your ads if you do shit like that Google? I've already ditch Google for DuckDuckGo due to tracking.
Do you imagine that the Suddeutsche Zeitung is based anywhere other than southern Germany? They lost the suit.
If as first you don't succeed, sue and sue again
It was a lawsuit between Cologne based Eyeo and Munich based Sueddeutsche. If they had fought it out as a soccer match instead in court, Sueddeutsche would have prevailed.
You can use that EFF tool, Privacy Badger. Though, I'm finding it tends to be a little aggressive about blocking tracking cookies, and some websites don't work right. But enh, I figure if a website breaks due to it's blocking cookies, nothing of value is lost.
Yes, it's perhaps a shameless plug, but I just really like that tool.
Remove Flash and that gets rid of all of the annoying ads from most things. There's a script called "youtube-dl" to both get to youtube without flash and to get the content you actually want without the annoying ad.
Germany, like most (no, all) countries in Europe, is a Rechtsstaat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat - note the certain Germanic sound of that word), so follows the rule of law; the North-European countries in general, and the Germans in particular seem to take a particular pride in being law-abiding and care a great deal about not just the letter, but also the spirit of the law. This may be different in America - one sometimes get that impression - but we have a strong tradition for this in Nordic culture; look up as an example the concept of the Lawspeaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawspeaker). Knowing, understanding and following the law is a part of our cultural identity, and implying that our courts are biased or corrupt is hurtful and rather insulting on a level that may surprise outsiders.
1) The german courts are ruling preferrentially in favor of german companies (surprise,it's captain obvious to the rescue)
All the companies involved in this case were German, you idiot.
If you want to get rid of ads on Android you need root anyway, if only for the option to disable the adservice in Google Play Services thereby making a lot of apps (not only the browser) adfree.
That's the absolute worst mindset to have. Whenever you talk to a "non-technical person" (it's their words, not mine) about issues such as the recent FBI v Apple case, you'll generally find a response similar to "The government can look at my stuff, I have nothing to hide". It's these people who side with the "but terrorism" argument, and end up screwing all of us. We don't need backdoors, we don't need invasions of privacy, we don't need tracking, we need strong encryption and security.
This is the true "problem" being faced by the media publishers crying foul over blocking advertising but there is nothing they can do about that. Instead they are targeting the consumers by attempting to force everyone to be subjected to invasive and often dangerous advertising methods.
The large media companies want to protect their revenue by forcing people to accept adverts by law on the pages they visit. The only reason I block advertising is because they are a very popular vector for virus infection. The publishers want to monetize their content with advertising by handing over control of their advertising to third parties who sell to the highest bidder in fraction of a second auctions. Doing this means that they have little to no control over some of the content on their pages. This practice opens up legitimate websites to become targets for distributors of malware, ransomware and the like.
They want to have their cake and eat it; be completely absolved of the responsibility for the content displayed on their site but assume full responsibility for the profit generated by advertising.
No. Advertise responsibly, take control over all the content on your site, don't track my every move in an Owellian nightmare of privacy invasion and I will white list your site. I might even click an advert. Until this system of advertising delivery fundamentally changes... there's always someone else willing to offer the same type of content for free elsewhere. The media industry can't stop people from publishing their own blog or reporting on world events but they can try to lobby for laws to protect their broken revenue sources.
Well, in Germany they can try.
The folks over at BlockAdblock raise some interesting issues re the DMCA though.
It's not that adblocking is illegal. It isn't. It's totally fine to block ads.
BUT... and this is a big but... It's probably NOT legal to circumvent protective measures under the DMCA.
http://blockadblock.com/adblocking/is-adblock-plus-violating-the-dmca/
Or some other protocol that fundamentally opposes the concept of inline graphic flashy shiny things, tracking users and those much hated "Here's the thing with ad blockers" popups that appear after you've already half-read the page
Mod parent up!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Though too many are F##KING annoying and resource hungry, and should be killed with nuclear fire.
The real problem though, is the dozens of TRACKERS that usually come with these ads.
They need to die in nuclear fire as well, along with their authors.
And in the rest of the world?
Under what rationale could any court justify the hijacking of one persons private resources in order to enrich another?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
âoeThe core business of the plaintiff [Axel Springer] is to deliver ads to its visitors. Journalistic content is just a vehicle to get readers to view the ads.â
You have to admire this kind of honesty. They admit their business is to serve ads. So complaints about "journalistic integrity" can't really be made of this site (or indeed any other).
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I blocked them when they started moving. I was okay with static banners, but "Shock The Monkey" I think was what drove me block whatever I could.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
If you are conscious about Google spying on you, you shouldn't be using GMail in the first place...
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
That's a nonsensical question. The web is not a monolithic service that has a fixed cost for which its owner must be reimbursed. The web is made up of untold millions of individual sites, the vast majority of them free of charge, and its value lies in its diversity. It is not a consumer-pays web.
A few late arrivals from traditional publishing seem to think that they are special, and are asking who is going to pay for their website. Nobody! If this means that they will disappear, excellent, and good riddance. That would be exactly the desired outcome, because they don't understand the web and are trying to roll back time.
I started blocking them when they were called banners. I would block them anywhere if I had the chance. Be it on websites, on the front of my screen, in magazines, on the street, as a logo or on my underwear.
To quote Banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs.
-- Banksy
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hence not only the letter, but the spirit of the law.
When you know that the spirit of the law is important, you will also know that the written law is NOT fool proof and never will be. Understanding this is good.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That part and parcel of the point I was making AC...
adblock plus is better than nothing but uses tons of ram and is just too "mainstream" now.
ublock origin is the way to go. Much lighter weight, saves ram and processor, has that exclusive air about it.
ublock origin was blocking ads before blocking ads was mainstream.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Users have the right to block banners.
Websites have the right to block users who block banners.
Deal with it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I use NoScript for Firefox. A side-effect of blocking 3rd party scripts is most advertising gets blocked out. I don't care much about ads, but I'm not going to let some random third party run scripts on my computer when I visit a web site. If the site wants to serve up static jpegs as ads, that's fine, it works, and I don't care about it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
For the right retainer, you can find any number of lobbyists and think-tank parasites who will argue that America, Free Enterprise, and the very concept of private property itself cannot be upheld if people are allowed to control what code is executed on their computers.
Every mental gymnast has a price; and we have some very talented ones.
Was this even in doubt? I mean seriously, who the fuck gave anyone control over what plugins I install on MY computer?
To further the point the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Germany's constitutional court) is the most trusted public institution by far. Getting consistent (over several decades) approval/trusted rating of 70% and upwards [1].
Also to enforce your rights against the government you have four courts that the government can not appeal (since it has no basic rights). The lowest being the Bundesgerichtshof which is the top civil court, then you have the EU's Court of Justice and the supernational European Court of Human Rights and then the Bundesverfassungsgericht. In Germany all of their rulings are legally binding if they find a violation of basic rights.
[1] http://www.infratest-dimap.de/...
1) The german courts are ruling preferrentially in favor of german companies (surprise,it's captain obvious to the rescue)
All the companies involved in this case were German, you idiot.
So I guess he was right!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When I issued the GET request, you responded. I did not play the ad or display the ad content and did not GET request on the load for the advertising, yet your server agreed to this and I did as I wished with your permission.
Why the hell do you call that theft?
Where, for example, is the loss of your content if I don't take it? It's a funny theft when I leave stuff alone...
Problem is that people get their news socially these days, e.g. via a link from a summary on Slashdot or Facebook.
But then who pays for Slashdot or Facebook, if not those sites' advertisers? And who pays for verification that it isn't a hoax, if not the advertisers on Snopes?
I already pay for the internet.
And how much of your ISP bill is your ISP remitting to site operators? Probably a lot less than cable television retransmission fees, if any at all. The only case I'm aware of where ISPs pay a site operator is ESPN3.
There was a link at the bottom of this page to go there, it looked interesting so I clicked on it.
Up comes the demand that I disable my adblocker.
As they say in the old country - No fucking way.
So now Wired joins Forbes and a number of other sites that are on the list at the same level as goatse or tubgirl. Having had the chance to do some browsing on another computer that allowed the whole shebang of intrusive crap the trackers and advertisers ram down our gullets, it's painfully slow - reminiscent of the days of 14.4 dialup. And worse than the last time I went bareback on the web.
And now that the Grandmas of the world are finding out that their computer can be "fixed" by blocking scripts and ads, look out. This cure is not just for geeks like me any more. Grandma net is remarkably quick and powerful. Even my wife's friends are hearing about this cool thing I installed on her laptop, and maybe Ol could install it on their computer too?
And that is what the ad/malware servers are afraid of.
For Forbes and Wired - sorry friends, your using a scorched earth policy of demanding I open up my computer to the wild world of malware you serve, in order to see your content - you can go straight to hell. Your content is no where good enough to allow me to do that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If only there were some system in place for predicting the outcome of new court cases based on the verdicts in previous similar cases that were heard by the same court.
This is why I never browse while logged in to anything and I clear my cookies every time I close my browser. I also keep auto complete turned off. In addition, I run with noscript and will always leave google-analytics and other tracking domains blocked.
I do not need to run an ad blocker because the only ads I see are the plain-jane non scripted ones.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Don't accept any offer that isn't per pixel per minute the ad is on you monitor.
Then the site could turn it around by charging the owner of the monitor a pixel per minute rate to view the site, which rate happens to exactly match the rate that it pays the owner of the monitor to show ads, so that it all balances out.
"...hijacking..."
Sorry, no. Hijacking is not the word to be used here, no matter how strongly you may feel about ad blocking. A man has the right to filter his Internet traffic as he sees fit. This has now been codified into law several times, now again in Germany.
Even if a site features ads, those same sites have no ToS stating the ads needs to be viewed in light of accessing content. It may very well be "implicitly" implied, but a one-way assumption does not a contract make, legal, moral, otherwise.
I'm under no obligation to view that which I strongly know can have a negative impact on computers under my charge. Unless and until the ad industry cleans up their act or it becomes a federal crime to block ads, I will continue to do so both personally and here at work, where we block all ads, beacons, tracking at the network level. The bandwidth savings are pretty good, not to mention our malware complaints went down tremendously after doing so.
if they don't have a product anyone wants to pay for
I want to pay for a product: one single article that a search engine, social media friend, or other aggregator recommended to me. I just don't feel a need to pay for a large number of unrelated products on the same site by buying an all-you-can-eat subscription or a thousand page views. So how would a site operator go about letting a viewer pay for a single page, as opposed to paying for a year's access to the site? The fairly high per-transaction fees of credit cards and Bitcoin rule out their use for micropayments.
>try to tell people
FTFY. Turns out I own the fucking client machine and I decide what it fucking does, including which documents and data I fetch/render.
If you think there's an obligation involved, demand agreement, THEN you can demand participation. Better still if you wall access - in the rest of the proprietary world, they don't unconditionally broadcast "conditional" data.
Don't feed the trolls.
Indeed, that would have been brilliant; alas that I am now old and cynical. All the same, I think I speak with some authority in my previous comment: I am Danish, and know the culture from within, at least from the Danish point of view - it is also worth remembering that as a Dane, I have grown up with the memory of the German occupation, so don't have particularly good reasons to love all things German. That being said - Scandinavia and Germany used to be not so much a well defined set of nations, as a large number of rather small, sovereign mini-states that were mostly identified by their common culture, which had a strong oral element to it. Hence the role of the Lawspeaker, and the significane of gathering regularly to hear the law spoken out loudly, to be memorised, interpreted and understood.
Perhaps it is difficult for others to quite accept this, but as a Dane, I feel strongly that the law is something that must feel right and fair - a good law is one that you instinctively approve of and not something you try to find ways to get around.
And in the rest of the world?
Under what rationale could any court justify the hijacking of one persons private resources in order to enrich another?
I think that's called taxes. I'm fairly certain that's applied and enforced by every 'government' in the world.
"1) The german courts are ruling preferrentially in favor of german companies (surprise,it's captain obvious to the rescue)"
Not at all the reason of the judgement was a contractual basis. This has nothing to do with being a german company in fact the company ruled AGAINST was german.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Further, he claims this is a due to nationalism. Based on the fact that in a case of German company vs. German company, a court ruled in favor of German company.
How fucking retarded do you have to be to accept that argument?
It's really sad that this is (the OP claiming nationalism) the depths to which commentary on Slashdot has descended. Where have all the really smart people gone? Here we are wasting time pointing out utterly obvious logical fallacies that a 2nd-grader could have pointed out. Absolutely pathetic.
Looks like the German courts' one-sided ruling are favoring home grown boys
Except that the guys who brought the cases are also Germans. Axel Springer, for example, is one of the largest newspaper and magazine publishers in Germany.
So, how about you get your facts straightened out and try again?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's all stuff they announced at their developers conference going on now. Feel free to scroll on by
Yet you're still here every day
Mod parent up!
Why would anyone want to do that? He starts off with a completely meaningless assertion.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So you complain about articles relating to Microsoft by being the very first poster to talk about Microsoft in the discussion of an article that has nothing to do with them and doesn't even mention them.
You should really lay off the bath salts, friend.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Cologne was founded by the Romans under the name of Colonia Agrippina. That was later germanized to Koeln and francified to Cologne. Munich and München come both from the original name forum apud Munichen. At least that's the name the town has in the oldest remaining documents. Apparently, the French and English omitted the -en, and the Germans the -i- from the name.
Except I get benefits from paying taxes to the government, like fire services, schools and a militia to defend me from evil Canadians pouring across the border. I don't get benefits from being served ads, which take up space I'd rather use to read/watch content, and no share of the money exchanged in advertising comes to me. The discovery of new products and services that I will actually use is minimal to the point of being nonexistent.
Germany, like most (no, all) countries in Europe, is a Rechtsstaat (...), so follows the rule of law; the North-European countries in general, and the Germans in particular seem to take a particular pride in being law-abiding and care a great deal about not just the letter, but also the spirit of the law. This may be different in America - one sometimes get that impression
We certainly argue about what the laws mean, with people adhering to their preferred interpretations, regardless of what other people are doing.
We do generally hold that "ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
However, our Supreme Court recently ruled that because a police officer had a "good faith belief" that a law was being violated, therefore, the defendant's 4th Amendment rights were not violated - despite the fact that the problem the officer observed was not a violation of the law.
So, apparently, "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" only applies to the defendant.
- but we have a strong tradition for this in Nordic culture; .... Knowing, understanding and following the law is a part of our cultural identity, and implying that our courts are biased or corrupt is hurtful and rather insulting on a level that may surprise outsiders.
In the US, implying - or out right accusing - government entities of being biased or corrupt is a time honored tradition. Generally those on the "loosing side" of a decision, action or ruling are quick to make such implications/accusations. This happened, for example, after the Marbury v. Madison ruling in 1803.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
OTOH, if your ads are fetched from multiple third parties, instead of served locally, then it's noscript, ghostery, and disconnect for you.
I can think of two ways to serve ads locally. One is to sell ad space locally, which requires each site to operate its own full-service ad sales department. Said department can prove impractical for a small site, and advertisers tend to worry more about click fraud on smaller sites that sell their own ad space. The other is to arrange for the site server to proxy the ad server, which ad networks forbid at present.
What practical means of "served locally" did you have in mind? Or is it fine if a site just chooses one third party at a time and sticks with it?
I clicked on a link to a Wired article yesterday and it let me read the first part of the story. Until I tried to scroll down. Then it demanded that I disable script blockers for wired.com in order to read the rest of the article.
So I did. I enabled wired.com in NoScript. Same message. So I enabled condenastwhatever.com. Same message. And again after enabling two cloudfront servers. The rest were advertisers and trackers.
So what they really wanted is for me to allow all their trackers and data miners and 3rd party advertisements.
Fuck that. Host your own ads. In the meantime, I'll just ignore Wired and any other Conde Nast publications.
I can see the fnords!
Unless you have entered into a contractual arrangement with a website, it is up to you how your browser works. If that browser does not display ads, that is up to the user. If the user wants to run a greasemonkey script, that is up to the user. If a website wishes otherwise, it needs to have users sign up to a legally enforceable contract which stipulates how they use the site. That this is too much like hard work for both users and hosts is not the users' problem. (As for copyright legislation, I do think that needs to be fixed so as to regulate distributing copies from one person to another only.)
John_Chalisque
Since I do all my ad blocking in my firewall, firewalls without ad-holes are going to be illegal soon? Gotta take that ad medicine or else ...
I think there's no such thing as a good ad, ever. But I do get that there's some people who don't mind ads as long as they don't try to control your computer, install malware, break your browser, etc.
One problem here seems to be that of legal liability. Forbes famously went through some (trivial-to-get-around) efforts to stop people with adblockers from visiting. Then, once people whitelisted them, they served malware. Was Forbes liable for this? Probably not. The "third party" thing with a nest of licensing lets people point the blame down to some fly-by-night situation. The end result is that the website you visit isn't legally liable for the malware, and, ultimately, no one really is. This is absolutely unacceptable.
Some legal changes are needed to make this make sense. Possibly not the first order- for instance, maybe Forbes isn't liable. But there should be at least one and at most two parties that SHOULD be liable for serving malware, and this should be easily discoverable. I'm not sure how this would be written, but it seems like such a law could absolutely exist, or be enforced if it already does. Why would you ever trust ads if, in practice, no one is responsible for the malicious code that they serve? Even if you are willing to view an ad, you'd be a fool to do so in a world where every ad is a roll of the dice to determine if you lose your bank account, personal data, etc- all with no one responsible. That's absurd.
Indeed. These are German companies offering German content (and fortunately German is not a language spoken in the whole world as it is not a very good one -- yes, I am a German native speaker), and the lawsuits were against a German company. This, incidentally, was clear from the beginning. These rulings are quite disfavorable to "home grown boys", but I guess some people will just rather spout their misconceptions than having a single look at readily available facts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> In UK law they have a definition of what a reasonable thinking person is: "The man on the Clapham omnibus"
Good point: this just about sums up how bizarre *English* law is. We are not talking about UK law - Scotland never bought into the whole concept of common law. And why should they? A hypothetical man on a bus in London certain does not define how Scottish law is to be applied :-)
You're not even close, mate.
It's Stevn, not Stephen.
Eat the rich.