Legal action by publisher Axel Springer, which aims to outlaw ad blocking on copyright grounds, has been revived by Germany’s top court.
Case file: https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bgh&Art=en&client=12&pos=0&anz=1&Blank=1.pdf&nr=142511 (German)
In their opening statements, the lawyers defending ad blocking should begin by spend endless minutes doing nothing but reading verbals ads into the record on the courts time. If the judge asks them to stop reading the ads, the lawyer should then ask if the case is now concluded in the favor of ad blocking as ad blocking should be allowed to consume the relevant content instead of being forced to listen to ads or if the judge is saying that all parties must be forced to consume an unlimited amount of ads lest they face the force of law by blocking/skipping the ads.
The judge would absolutely reject that argument but I’m in favor entirely because it’s funny AF.
To clarify the title: The court overturned past decision that said ad blocking is not piracy and retured the question back to the same lower court to re-consider it on the new grounds from this ruling.
‘It interferes with our business model!’ Good, fail. Kill the entire industry.
It’s my computer.
Fuck you.
World is fucked.
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Seriously -_-
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! @
