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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.
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.
A large German news site (Der Spiegel) recently tried that aggressively. My response was to basically stop reading it. After a few weeks they went back to the old scheme, which tells me they were bleeding traders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
To be fair their argument wasn't quite that stupid. They claimed that the pages were copyrighted works (true) and that ad-blockers were altering them, transforming them into a new unlicenced work. Kinda like if someone took a print magazine, stuck masking tape over all the adverts and sold it on as their own version.
A key point is that AdBlock Plus does actual profit from blocking ads. It takes money from advertisers to whitelist their ads and offers consultation services. So the transformed work has commercial value.
But as the court noted, this technology is different. The browser is under no obligation to render a page a certain way, and in fact often overrides the publisher's wishes with the user's preferences. Larger fonts, high contrast mode, text to speech etc. Disable image loading was a basic feature right back in the Mozaic browser days.
Plus there are many examples of similar technologies, such as the fast forward button on a DVR, the auto-volume limit system on a TV, earplugs, 3D glasses with two left lenses, photocopiers and the like.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC