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German Supreme Court Rules Ad Blockers Legal (faz.net)
New submitter paai writes: The publishing company Axel Springer tried to ban the use of ad blockers in Germany because they endanger the digital publishing of news stories. The Oberlandesgericht Koln (Germany's Higher Regional Court of Cologne) followed this reasoning and forbade the use of ad blockers on the grounds that the use of white lists was an aggressive marketing technique. [The business model allows websites to pay a fee so that their "non aggressive" advertisements can bypass AdBlock Pro's filters. Larger companies like Google can afford to pay to have the ban lifted on their website.] The Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice or BGH) destroyed this court ruling today and judged that users had a right to filter out advertisements in web pages.
> they endanger the digital publishing of news stories
So do eyelids. You can offer whatever content you want. That's it. That's all you can do online: Offer. Whether it's a credential-restricted content (ie premium) or simply open pages, the viewer decides whether to access. The viewer decides whether to subscribe, literally (paywall) or figuratively. Can't force buyers, can't force viewers.
Whether the selective mechanism is eyeballs or software is irrelevant.
What makes someone think they have a *right* to run their code (JS) on my machine without my explicit permission?
Would they allow me to run my own arbitrary code on their computers? Why not?
Website operator: If you don't like folks blocking your ads, it's perfectly fine for you to refuse to serve them up your data.. It would be nice if you let me know why, but it's up to you.
Browsing user: You are free to decide what to block and what to accept.
I get hit by this all the time... "We detect you are running an add blocker...." Followed by a plea to turn it off... If I want the content from your site, I'll let your ads display.. But my ad blocker stays on by default and if you don't provide enough value to make it worth pausing my blocker for you, I suggest you may not be in business very long anyway.
Why did we need to tie this up in court? It was a waste of time and money doing that.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I posit that advertisements are simply a form of information pollution. Instead of getting just the information you want, that information is polluted with contaminated by the inclusion of advertisements. There is a far better argument to be made for outlawing unrequested advertisements than there is for forcing people to see them.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Lynx! No ads, no funky JS/whatever....Yeah, baby!!!
the computer owned by the user. The user still has control over their computer and browser :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So the source link won't let me read the article.....because I have ad block running. Ironic.
I can't think of any reason they wouldn't be. After all, my computer is my property, not yours.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
FYI: Websites usually don't bother to actually "detect" that you're using an ad blocker.
How it works: The website's static content is the message claiming that they detected that you're using an-ad blocker, and then javascript served from an adblocked domain alters the page to hide the message. (User thinks: "OMG! They know!")
Doesn't matter to me how they do it or even if they know or not.. If I don't think their content is worth the effort, they won't be sending me anything..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
We need ad blocker blockers! And ad blocker blocker blockers!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm guessing this is the perfect court to raise a stink about ad blockers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Lawful or not, I am going to employ the most aggressive ad-blocking setup I can get my hands on. Try and stop me.
there would be no ad-blockers.
For the younger of the readers: When stuff was published on paper, publishers of course took responsibility for the whole of their publication, includings advertisements. If you wanted to publish an ad, you had to go through the publisher's ad department. You could not just book a slot from some 3rd-party, and have them deliver a bag of Anthrax spores or poo-poo with every newspaper.
Of course web sites could still take responsibility, and publish just still images integrated into their layout, served from their servers. But they opted to let others annoy you with all kinds of malware and distraction - and now they get punished as deserved.
They should be viewed in the same way Anti-Virus software is. Especially in today's Ad-verse.
Few of the sites place their own ads. It's mostly 3rd party ad services. It's a crazy bidding process for a lot of companies on both the ad seller end and the display side. There's plenty of broken, abusive or malware infested ads that pop up even with the big player ad services.
People should almost be required to block them.
I don't mind ads. if they aren't interstitials, don't autoplay video, don't cause 4 cores to spike, don't infect my desktop and aren't 20M in size.
Unfortunately i run into all of these all too often.
Good for them that sanity prevailed in this instance.
If you are using an ad blocker you are STEALING! Look at all this great content! Where do you think it comes from? Everyone should be forced to watch 1-2 hours of mandatory advertising per day in order to support the content creators!
Just watch a group of 2 year olds interact
Most folks grow up and recognise that unbridled capitalism works about as well as it did when they were two.
You might want to look to see if you can find patterns of behaviour in children that exhibit co-operative, almost socialist behaviour. It exists, just as surely as selfishness exists. They tend to be phases of development and say less about society than you seem to think.
The problem is socialism doesn't work for the very reason why 2 year olds act like they do, folks want more but don't want to work for it
Some people are selfish. They want more for themselves, even if it costs other people something. Other people are selfless. They aren't satisfied unless they know that everyone is doing OK. Most people are a mix of both traits, and to a degree capitalism/socialism align with those traits.
It's human nature and it cannot be suppressed enough for socialism to work
Pure socialism, sure. But then pure capitalism fails in similar ways, for much the same reasons (selfishness of a few). Your simplistic comparison fails to account for the reality that hard-work is not equally rewarded; that early access to capital creates monopolies that even passively create too high a barrier to entry for new 'hard workers' and that actively seek to perpetuate their power and ignores the tragedy of the commons.
It's human nature to co-operate as well. We're social animals. History is filled with examples of co-operation just as much as it is filled with competition. It's almost like we're animals with complex social interactions.
Capitalism, moderated and regulated and with strong social policies is a fantastic system and those societies that follow this model have some of the highest standards of living for their citizens in the world. The mix of capitalist and socialist policies avoids the weaknesses of each and takes advantage of the strengths of both.
Those are concepts that many adults don't understand these days
The 'American Dream', social mobility and the idea that hard work will result in bettering oneself and one's children has been becoming less true for some time. The US has some of the worst social mobility of any first world country. If some people are refusing to buy into the idea that hard work pays off, maybe they have a better understanding of how hard work is repaid at quite different rates depending on a wide range of factors, including race, socio economic background, educational opportunities etc.
If you want to understand why more people, today, seem to not buy in to the old 'hard work will result in a better life' maybe you should look beyond simplistic stories about two year old behaviour and selfishness. Maybe the income disparity in the US might also clue you in as to why some people have decided that the system that seems to have been good to you isn't one that's likely to be as good for them.
But nah. Social responsibility = socialism = evil is so much simpler.
Because in addition to blocking ads I block JavaScript.
....because I have An Ad blocker on. The Irony of it all...
The translation "Supreme Court" is misleading. The BGH is the second highest German court. The highest one is the BVG, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, i.e. the court deciding things regarding the German constitution. The BHG is however the highest court you can come up to using appeals for concrete things. The BVG only takes constitutional stuff and may decide to ignore you.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly: Technology is only a secondary, enabling cause of the problem. Fundamentally the problem stems from the abdication of responsibility (or liability) and how businesses and consumers are organizing themselves.
We know know how to find the best value, and its quite easy.
[($)]
This ruling was made by the German Federal Court of Justice, which is the highest court unless questions of constitutionality are involved. The plaintiff claimed that this is the case and announced that they will now go to the German Federal Constitutional Court. So the ruling could still be overthrown.
Sorry, I forgot that there are no capitalist countries on planet earth.
No true scotsman. By the same argument there have never been any socialist countries, either. I still think that it's possible to look at the examples that have existed and extrapolate from them. Certainly the GP seemed to be discussing capitalism and socialism in that way and I replied in that spirit.
If you have a specific criticism of something I said, please make your point.
Handwaving about a lack of 'true' capitalism is noise.
It is a german tabloid. They added a script (possibly server side) so that if you have an ad blocker they don't serve the page (well they serve the page then show a blank page with "why I don't see that page").
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
the most interesting point in this trial was their argument about the webservice main purpose is advertising, not providing news (they run a big yellow press news portal). They are also one of the main reasons terrorism in germany escalated in the 60s,
First of all: good for the court! I hope Springer gets smacked similarly at the Constitutional court.
Second: the funniest thing I heard in this context is the words "quality journalism" in one phrase with Springer. For a long time they had the monopoly on fake news here, until they were shortly overtaken by even more disgusting outlets.
I think there is no clear resolution as basically two issues were raised, yet only one answered.
The overall theme seems to be the question if adblockers were legal. Yet the detail that AdBlock had a whitelist that advertisers could buy into was not clearly handled by the courts.
While I agree that yes, adblockers should be legal, I disagree that AdBlock's business model is thus legal as well. The people hosting the ads are getting money from the advertisement companies. Now AdBlock is trying to force the sites to pay extra so their ads are not blocked.
Basically it's a mob style protection racket.
Not to mention this fact is not even clear to the user, who becomes is unknowingly complicit in the racket.
FYI: Websites usually don't bother to actually "detect" that you're using an ad blocker.
How it works: The website's static content is the message claiming that they detected that you're using an-ad blocker, and then javascript served from an adblocked domain alters the page to hide the message. (User thinks: "OMG! They know!")
No, actually many sites these days do a ton of work to detect adblockers and then not serve the content or delete it from the page. These systems are even sold as very expensive third party services to publishers and use incredibly malicious methods to evade and detect the blockers.
It's a constant cat and mouse game. I've kept up with the developments because whenever a page gives me shit about my blocker or manages to display ads, I make it my mission to upgrade my block setup until that page can no longer avoid or identify it. Even though I don't care about their content in the slightest at that point. It's a matter of principle. If I'm feeling petty I might also then proceed to waste their bandwidth a bit.
Free tip: The current king is Nano Adblocker + Nano Defender and a bunch of the most up to date antiadblock lists (on Firefox; Chrome currently has some cross-site scripting style exploits that the delivery services are abusing. They can also detect chrome's developer tools open and proceed to clear the console and hide their nasty tricks etc.)
Really something like this has to be expected from Axel Springer Media company. They are literally the worst media company in Europe & US I've heart about. Because of their trashy articles they have a high readership in Germany and because of this high number, they contact public persons and press them for either interviews or pictures of their private life, or else threatens them to publish negative articles about them. Multiple persons have reported these incidents but unbelievable as it sounds, this kind of threats are legal in Germany. Just to be clear if we talk about negative articles, we are talking about First page articles which can go on for weeks.
One famous victim of their trashing was former president of Germany Christian Wulff. After he declined to publish pictures of his private life and interviews with them, they literally bombed him every day with negative articles because of a "legal" lone he took from a business man (seriously). Because of this trashing he had to resign from this position, though he was much beloved in Germany before those articles.
Those people should be in jail and it's a pity that instead of that, they are prosecutors in the Court.
So that shows you have to be a real mafia-style criminal, to push for such restrictive regulations of the internet.
I don't block Ads, I don't particularly care if a website shows ads.
What I don't like is
Annoying animated GIFs
Auto-loading videos with audio.
Spyware that attempts to track my every move.
Ghostery blocks the latter and this pretty much results in the former also being blocked because these scumbags can't resist spying on everyone.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
If that were true, you could just reload the page without pausing your adblocker. This does not work.
time for sites to detect the ad blockers and put up big pages instead of the stories telling people to whitelist the site or they won't see anything.
enough sites do this and people will wise up.
The blank page overlaying the actual page, I mean.
Actually, there is a whole ad blocker warning blocklist nowadays.
The entire and sole point of advertisement, is to manipulate you into giving your money for something that is inferior to the best choice. Aka harming you, white collar psychopath style.
Otherwise, you would just find them at the top of your filtered and sorted by numeric properties list of products on a comparison site like geizhals.at/skinflint.co.uk/...
I don't have a problem with ad supported sites. It's the aggressive and sketchy ones that are a problem. Advertising support needs to be in the HTML/CSS/etc standards in a way that makes it useful to advertisers and behave reasonably towards users. Then we can just block advertisements that try to go around that.
> The Oberlandesgericht Koln (Germany's Higher Regional Court of Cologne)
Köln != Cologne
Privacy begins with
No, actually many sites these days do a ton of work to detect adblockers and then not serve the content or delete it from the page.
Bullshit. It's Javascript plain and simple. If it were anything else then I, someone who does not use any ad-blocker, but who does use Noscript, would not be impacted. And yet I am.
Sorry, you've misunderstood. The default content visible is "we've detected that you're using an ad blocker." You have to run the Javascript served from the adblocked domain to instruct the web browser to hide the default message and make the "normal" content visible.
In some cases you can go in and hack the DOM with something like Firebug to see the normal content.
Words mean things.. Socialism is a form of government that is, at it's core, the government controlling all resources and doling them out to everybody. "To Each according to their need." and all. Your definition is just the slippery slope that leads to socialism as a form of government.
My point remains, socialism doesn't work because people are going to naturally look out for their own self interest. You can see this in the failed governments of history which where based on socialism. Or even current governments where socialism is being practiced. Such places have a ruling class which grows very rich and a growing population of poor who suffer greatly from lack.
Venezuela is an excellent example of how this progresses. 20 years ago this country was a thriving capitalistic country with a bright future. They had huge natural resource wealth, a vibrant economy and one of the highest standards of living in south America. Now look at where they are. They have a uber rich ruling class and hordes of poor destitute people who have no food, no resources and no prospects. All this in less than 20 years of "socialism" where the government took over private industry "to give it back to the people" and now there is nothing left. The poor are going to suffer greatly, but that's the legacy of socialism. the poor ALWAYS pay the price for bad government.
Capitalism on the other hand, has lifted more people to a higher standard of living than any other kind of economic policy. Take the USA for example, even our poor have a higher standard of living than a frighteningly large fraction of the world's population. This is due in large part to our capitalistic form of government and the ability for such a system to generate wealth. Wealth that lifts all of us to a standard of living which is the envy of the world.
Yet you wish to throw it away on something proven not to work?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Indeed, words mean things - so why are you trying to make up your own definition of socialism out of thin air? Socialism == workers owning the means of production. Not that hard to understand, really.
FTFY. Iran, Iraq, Chile, Congo and others the victim of American coups, and six million dead just between Korea and Vietnam.
Yes, look at how their GDP has tripled while lifting millions of people out of generational poverty. Look at the US supported coup in 2003, the currency manipulations, the laughable sanctions that were imposed by claiming Venezuela was a threat to the US, and the many millions of dollars the US has spent to subvert Venezuela's democracy. Before whining like a bitch about 13 twitter trolls.
Only for those who would have already been rich robber barons. Demand creates jobs, not capitalism. The three richest people in the United States are worth more than the bottom half of the population, and here you think Venezuela has a failed system?
The rewriting of history is strong with this one.. The ills in Venezuela are NOT from direct US intervention or externally applied policies. They clearly are from the implementation of socialism and government mismanagement of "the means of production" which always happens. The rest of your examples are just as invalid.
Socialism also means: " (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism."
So... The end state of socialism is communism. It's the logical destination. Which is why I used the definition I used. It's the destination you are headed towards. This form of government is responsible for a very large number of deaths and suppression of human rights world wide both in the past and in current events. You need to own that.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How kind of them to deign to let me decide what I hear and see!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
* Scenery -- how many fucking billboards do we need visually polluting our spaces??
That's actually one of the beautiful things about Hawaii. When I visited there were ZERO billboards anywhere. It was lovely. Now I haven't seen the entire state but I've been all over Oahu and didn't see a single one.
BTW you forgot about having zero respect for your Privacy. I have zero interest in being tracked around the internet by advertising companies.
If the page is made up on the fly, it is not a fixed work, it is therefore not copyrightable. Your argument fails at the first step.
This is due in large part to our capitalistic form of government and the ability for such a system to generate wealth.
Shouldn't you be in school right now?
(in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism.
So... The end state of socialism is communism.
Literally the only people who believe that are Marxists and you. For those of us who aren't trying to ignite the worldwide proletariat revolution socialism is medicare, medicaid, social security, and SNAP. God save us all if you don't think there is a way to avoid medical bankruptcy without global stateless communism.
Pure bias and extremist idealism post... You need to really step back from your way off the chart extremist to come back a bit to the middle...
So those companies say it will spoil their business if we were free to read the main part of the homepage instead getting annoyed by stupid ads?
Well, look at those companies. They all hide behind a front desk or fences, locked doors. When the consumer can show up at the office of the owner of that company to ask, discuss,complain...i would allow ads....
Your typical capitalist projection is noted.
As is your gaslighting.
Mismanaged to the point their GDP tripped while lifting millions out of poverty. Like I said the first time.
Sounds like a communist saying it would be "logical" that as soon as you find capital investors for your landscaping business, you'll sexually harass your secretary, dump toxic waste in the river, defraud your investors, and order mob hits on your rivals. Of course, there probably has never been a communist that was that much of an idiot to suggest such "logic".
Riiiiiiight. Like you capitalists have owned up to slavery, genocide, and occupying other nations for over two centuries. Then there's the fact that all the socialist violence you'd like to whine was just a backlash to capitalist exploitation. You never would have had Castro without the brutal dictatorship of Batista. You never would have had the Soviet Union if it weren't for the Tsars.
Heads, socialism wins, tails, capitalism loses.