I would VERY much appreciate a court ruling that makes spreading misinformation and propaganda illegal

Of course torrentfreak would use the most outrageous & clickbaity title possible. It’s not so bad though.
Discussed in another post:

I speak German legalese (don’t ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.

The way I read it, the higher court simply stated that the Appeals court didn’t consider the impact of source code to byte code transformation in their ruling, meaning they had not provided references justifying the fact they had ignored the transformation. Their contention is that there might be protected software in the byte code, and if the ad blocker modified the byte code (either directly or by modifying the source), then that would constitute a modification of code and hence run afoul of copyright protections as derivative work.

Sounds more like, “Appeals court has to do their homework” than “ad blockers illegal.”

The ruling is a little painful to read, because as usual the courts are not particularly good at technical issues or controversies, so don’t quote me on the exact details. In particular, they use the word Vervielfältigung a lot, which means (mass) copy, which is definitely not happening here. The way it reads, Springer simply made the case that a particular section of the ruling didn’t have any reasoning or citations attached and demanded them, which I guess is fair. More billable hours for the lawyers! @

Let’s take a deep breath and consider what’s happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.

It’s entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it’s not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it’s eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.

So the headline should read more like “German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement.”

The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.

It can’t be said often enough: fuck Axel Springer.

This device is now mandated to watch TV or browse the internet in Germany:

Here’s a thing about LLMs, they will effectively make laws like this meaningless. Law comes in to enforce against a company building a program to block ads, extension goes off market. Someone asks their LLM “create an extension function referencing the same data set for my browser that performs the same function” boom new extension with no central point of distribution. Share the prompt on a forum, now everyone has a custom ad blocker. Or not so far down the road, LLM is directly built into the browser, no extension needed just prompt “do not display known advertisements on pages I request before loading, but perform background activity which gives feedback to the site that ads have loaded” boom done.

In a way, local LLMs are like distributed applications, they make enforcement against specific program functions pretty much impossible.

Welp, guess I’m a YouTube pirate now

They didn’t rule it, they overturned a previous decision. Not that this isn’t bad but it does not mean right now that using ad blockers is illegal. I also think reading other articles on this, that the ruling is also more focused on Adblock plus working with advertisers to allow some ads but block others.

That’s foul. I wouldn’t touch YouTube without Ublock. You ever try watching that garbage without it?

The one app game I like(d) was Scrabble. It was sold and is now an endless stream of ads. Turn, ad, turn, ad, turn, ad, nonstop. It’s unplayable. I had to delete it.

Ad blockers make media consumable. Granted, less screen time would likely benefit everyone.

So they’re gonna reign in the data brokers and surveillance capitalists? Right?

Example 624994931# for who bourgeois “democracies” are really protecting

What’s next? Forcing people to buy articles in the supermarket? Forcing people to go to the cinema? Why is copyright law even applicable here??

Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean “privacy”.

I’ve never been blocking ads of Axel Springer, because I’ve been blocking all of their rotten publications. Get bent, you assholes.

In a very general sense it is, the ads should pay for the content. But fuck them because even paid services add ads. And paying for Internet access, you can’t tell me what I can and can’t block. Good luck proving people are blocking ads at the DNS level.