Given the other restrictions on internet use in China, it should have come as no surprise, but I had no idea this was the law of the land there.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
"China takes a different approach to protect the ad-based business model under unfair competition law and bans ad blocking software directly by regulation. The Chinese courts held that providing ad blocking software is anti-competitive under a vague general principle of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law."
On Android, the situation is slightly better, since browsers can be sideloaded, but ad blockers would quickly become a niche phenomenon.
The spirits that I called...
They also made laws happen that limit how Google can link to news sites to prevent Google News from stealing readers.
And they tried to make Google pay each time a user clicks a link that leads to a German news site.
Also there are surcharges on printers (around $50 or so per piece), laptops etc because you might copy copyright-protected texts with it.
And the German online news websites know they lose a lot of money to adblockers so of course they want to ban them.
The same with hosts files: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts
Good luck banning Unix config files. My machine, my rules.
The big picture includes:
• A large majority of the politician's constituents each regularly use several large websites that cost a lot of money to run, and the constituents would be upset if those sites went away. Someone has to pay for those sites. Ads are the most common way that is currently done.
• Almost nobody likes ads other than in some exceptional cases [1].
• Most people dislike paid subscriptions. This dislike grows exponentially as the number of subscriptions they need to cover the content they want goes up.
• Many people think they would like micropayments but would likely change their mind once that actually became an options. If people have to pay money they tend to greatly prefer predictable monthly costs. It's not necessarily rational, but for many people if they see they spent $1.26 on YouTube videos in one month and $2.76 in the next month they are going to be annoyed even though they watched a lot more videos that second month.
• Some sort of Spotify or Netflix for the Web type thing might work, but as with subscriptions if you have to use more than one of these types of service people will be annoyed.
• Another approach would be to make the web version of the site limited, and require using an app for full functionality. A social media site for example might only allow reading on the web, so if you want to post or comment you need to use the app where they have much more control than they do on the web.
If ad blocking becomes widespread enough and effective enough that sites do have to switch to some other revenue source it is quite possible that a majority of a politician's constituents will in retrospect find that they preferred the ad supported model.
Good politicians should be trying to figure out what would make their constituents happiest in the long run and find ways to encourage things to end up that way.
In the long run what would probably make most people happy (or rather make them the least unhappy) would be ad supported sites with restrictions on the ads to limit intrusiveness and tracking.
[1] For example many people like the ads that run during the Super Bowl in the US. A lot of people with no interest in the football game watch just to see the ads.
Would love to hear a down voter’s dissent because I’m not seeing it.
P.S. Today a site owner is not responsible if an ad is malware, they pass it on to the ad network, who passes it on, and so on.
> The full impact of this latest development is still unclear. The BGH will issue a more detailed written ruling explaining its decision. Meanwhile, the case has now returned to the lower court for additional fact-finding. It could be a couple more years until we have a clear answer. We hope that the courts ultimately reach the same sensible conclusion and allow users to install ad blockers.
I don't know how much this part affects the legal issues here, but for me that is quite a different situation than a pure ad blocker. There is a coercive element here, if your ad blocker is used widely enough and you take money for preferential treatment.
Unfortunately, the main use case I have for 'ad blockers' isn't just blocking visual ads; it's blocking sometimes tens of megabytes of third-party javascript, tracking, analytics, etc., which is not just a huge privacy issue but also slows the page down tremendously.
I remember working at a company which hosted and maintained, for a client, a forum for A-level testing students in the UK, or something of the sort. Over the years, they had insisted on us adding more and more to the site; third-party widgets, trackers, analytics, etc. Each time, we pushed back because of the impact to page loads, which leads to increased bounce rate, lower time-on-site, and so on, but they were the customer and had the final say.
Then, suddenly, Google announced that it was going to start factoring page load times into pages' search ratings and, overnight, the client was frantically asking us how we could improve their page times because they were absolutely atrocious.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, a lot of techniques came around to improve page load times while still letting you load your page full of noisy cruft and garbage, so now we have pages that load nice and quick and then, over the next few seconds, ruin themselves with trash that ruins the experience. "Articles" where every paragraph break is punctuated with another ad, pages with pop-up after pop-up asking if you want to join the site, sign up for a newsletter, check out our substack.
This is the sort of reason why people gravitate towards a site's app, I suspect, but that just solves the loading time issue and prevents you from blocking trackers and ads.
On principle I'd disagree, and say that those types of ads should be illegal to begin with. It's amazing how many straight up scams are being advertised on otherwise trusted platforms, like Youtube. You should be responsible for what ads you put up and make sure you aren't perpetuating something illegal.
I also have no faith in the ad companies not using this as the thin end of the wedge and opportunity to start chipping away at what constitutes a non-intrusive ad. Today they only allow static ads, in two years they'll allow gifs, and in five they'll allow autoplaying audio.
If a serious bargain could be made with the ad industry that we allow them to show non-intrusive ads, and don't block them, and in exchange, they behave like human beings, then I'd take that, but I'm still not convinced the people who work in those industries are quite human to begin with. And that bargain probably wouldn't even fix the 'site loads super slow because it has to download 5 GBs of JS bloat', which is something ad blockers and the like also help to manage.
What if it does it while showing me an ad for something at the same time?
How does running a bit of software on my computer concern anyone other than me?
I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the court's rulings but this seems assinine!
Maybe. The Court has only ruled that the lower instance has to research the topic more, there is no clear answer yet. But it's really notable how incredible wild the judgment is. They are speaking about objectcode and bytecode, and which of them are protected by law or not. F**ing insane. It's not really clear whether they are actually talking about JavaScript, or if someone explained/understood it wrong, or if they probably mean WebAssembly? Is WebAssembly used for ads and handled by Adblockers?
:)
I’m being completely serious here and so is he. I can barely use the web without ad blockers. They make it possible for me to participate in online life. Remove them and you largely remove me. An attack on ad blockers is a direct attack on even the slightly neurodivergent, and should be treated as such.
I would be interested in how German law works to make this so, IANAL but pretty sure USA copy right law does not work that way. Modification for personal use is normally going to be 100% acceptable under USA copyright law. The DMCA Anti-Circumvention is one exception I know to this but it was and is a big deal for being an exception.
Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.
But what ARE those legal protections? That's the really complicated bit isn't it? ADA does not simply mandate anything anyone could imagine at any price, and there still isn't a huge amount of caselaw when it comes to the web. FWIW in this specific case I think there is some basis, but it doesn't seem clearly established either. The natural starting point is the government ADA site's own guidance [0], and that in turn cites the W3's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as helpful. In turn, that has section 2.3 covering "Seizures and Physical Reactions". But that's specifically about physical effects, does mere distraction count, and at what threshold? Like, it says no more than 3 flashes per second, but if a site ensures it's just blinking once per second, you might still find that distracting but it's not clear there's any case under ADA unless you can point to some other precedent (or establish one yourself). Would offering a pay option that eliminates all ads be a reasonable accommodation or not? Did they make a good enough effort if they pick a major ad network that promises compliance? I don't know, but it doesn't seem cut and dry.
And all of that is about the website owner's responsibilities, not 3rd parties. Like, it doesn't seem clear to me there is any legal requirement for a given web browser to create/maintain APIs for ad blocking under ADA, and any such case would run into complex speech and other considerations particularly in the case of an open source browser (the same challenges also protect from the US government ever trying to ban them).
I think you have a decent moral/political argument which is important, but I guess just realize the legal aspects are complex. And that's before touching on the practical ones.
----
0: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/
1: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#seizures-and-physical-reaction...
I’m asking that they don’t go out of their way to take expensive and complex technical or legal steps that prevent me from bringing my own accommodations with me, ones that have zero effect on other visitors and cost the owner zero time, effort, and money.
Yes, I’m sure they’d prefer I watched the squares of pixels they sold to 3rd parties. I also bet they’d prefer not to have to pay to install a wheelchair ramp, but they don’t get to make that decision, either.
(Nor do I want to have to run malware in my browser, but I think that's a separate argument from the accessibility one.)
So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software. (IANAL)
I suspect owners of those sites either don't visit them or use ad blocker themselves.
We've had to adhere to the rulings at work; but when I ask the lawyers; "how do you enforce this?" they say as long as you make a best effort you are fine.
Wasted effort.
When prostitution is banned, do you think they install a cop in every bedroom to make sure there is no money exchange?
When drugs are banned, do you think they put a device in every person that beeps if they ingest drugs and a SWAT team Air drops on their house?
When a harmful business practices are banned, do you think a member of a regulatory body gets to attend or review every meeting and decision in every company to make sure that practice doesn't happen?
When graffiti is banned, do you think a cop joins you when you buy a spray can until you dispose of it?
When vaping on airplanes is banned, do you think they do a cavity search on every passenger to make sure no one is sneaking a juul and puffing into a towel?
When dumping industrial toxic waste into rivers is banned, do you think we install 4k cameras on all rivers to track whats being dumped there?
If this is your first time in a human society, welcome. Unlike math, nothing we do in society is a 100%, but we've been doing it for 10,000 years. You will demand "unenforceable" laws if you like them and scoff at ones you don't like. You already know how and will fit right in.
Less views means fewer network effects - for a small example, fewer people posting and discussing on sites like HN or reddit. And therefore less pull in of those unfortunate people who don't block ads, and less views overall.
I don't know if it actually works out that way, but I do think forcing people to accept the full bore of your annoying site or not use it at all is a double edged sword.
Obviously the one-click effortless and mainstream availability of adblocking is what they care about, not laborious methods accessible to just a few people with the ability and wherewithal.
If tooling is written around curl for this purpose that becomes accessible and mainstream and popular, yes that tooling would be treated like this.
Full disclosure: I am German.
It is scary to watch, because with Germany's slow bureaucracy, they probably only need to get such a thing through once, and then it would take years of effort of fighting against billions Euros lobbies by the people, because our politicians are so corrupt and bought by them. People would probably have to get to the streets in millions, which is unlikely to happen with "advanced" digital rights topics like ad blocking.
Germany is very much in danger of becoming even worse of a democracy than it is already. I am not quite sure where I read it, but somewhere I recently read that Germany has moved down in democracy ranking to a tainted democracy. Which it is. If politics don't change soon, AfD will get even more votes next time around, and then Europe will have an enemy of Europe in its heart, which as well is the most populous country. Not sure I want to go further into the future of this imagination.
Many countries in the EU or elsewhere, which are still democratic for the most part face similar challenges. I just wish people would finally punish these opportunists and criminals we have in our governments and political parties, by voting for something else. But I guess the average German person is too disconnected and too uninformed and eats it all up every 4 years, instead of voting for progressive parties, to bring some fresh air.
This world is becoming a fucking joke, ruled by crooked politicians who have their elections bought for them by corporations and billionaires.
I would hope that people will rise up and take back control since it's our planet not theirs, but everyone seems too fucking stupid and happy just watching marvel movies.
This is for the whole EU, not just Germany, but there's no reason why Germany couldn't employ further restrictions.
Sounds nice. But isn't remotely feasible
If a site has ads, and I can't block them, I'm not using that site.
If you take a quick look at their activity on HN, you can see they are a prolific submitter/commenter. I find it a bit amusing that someone's whos active than 99% of the people who frequent HN can just simply quit internet (and not an ad-ridden website).
I think the web is regressing to the point where it is more trouble than it is worth.
Well, one possible answer is that the content provider only actually provides that content under the condition that I look at the ads. After all, a lot of content providers are businesses and they don't like to give out content for free.
My stance has always been that for 99% of the stuff I consume on the internet, my condition is that I can access it the way I, as the end user / customer, prefer. And if you as the provider insist otherwise, my reaction will almost always be that I won't look at to your garbage ads but instead I'll just go somewhere else for content.
Or just read a book, ad-free [0].
For instance, they could be running affiliate links to online stores. “We reviewed these laptops: click here and we’ll get a commission.” “But that compromises our integrity!”, they might counter. But so does renting out space to advertisers! I genuinely don’t see the honest version as, well, less honest.
If a site that reviews televisions was contracting directly with Sony to show ads then yes, that's definitely an issue, but if they're telling an ad network to pick some ads then (typically!) that's sufficiently arm's-length.
Meanwhile, affiliate links can be much more directly bad; use offer code SCAMTOBER for 25% off this thing that I can assure you I've tried and tested and given a fair review, and which will definitely not turn out to have been a scam. Click here to purchase this laptop that I was sent for free and rated 9/10 and I'll get a 5% cut of whatever you buy.
I guess this is where affiliate programs through retailers are slightly more trustworthy; if anything I buy from your Best Buy link gets you a 5% commission then it doesn't really matter all that much which laptop you recommend because you're getting a cut no matter what I buy. As soon as Alienware offers you a 10% commission on that $3500 laptop, though, things get dicey.
The supreme court actually has rejected most of Axel Springer's² arguments and limited the revision to a single question (AFAICT, IANAL): Are the news websites in question some kind of computer program (protected under Section 8 of the UrhG³). The supreme court argues that the lower court did not sufficiently discuss this question in their ruling.
The supreme court explicitly notes that the lower court should also consider whether Springer actually has the sole rights to the 'computer program'.
Some thoughts:
a) As the supreme court mentioned, Springer might only own (exclusive) copyright to some parts of the computer program. It seems that they embed a lot of other JS code, e.g., Google stuff. This might mean that Springer needs to show that ABP actually modifies Springer's code. If ABP modifies e.g. AdSense code or the code of an open source library that Springer's websites use, Springer's copyright might not be infringed at all.
b) In German copyright law, only works are protected that are created by a human author. (Obviously, the author can also use software to create a protected work.) Given that a lot of JS/CSS code is written by automated rules (or LLMs), rights holders might need to prove that an actual human wrote the code.
c) As posted elsewhere in the thread: the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version⁴. So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software.
(A mentioned above: I am not a lawyer. Copyright law is complicated and interpretations are evolving)
¹)https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...
²) big German media conglomerate, not to be confused with SpringerNature
³) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/BJNR012730965.html#B...
"M'am, that vase in front of your TV could be used to block ads. You are going to have to move that."
Anyway, I see a great future for adblockers that render the whole page in a back buffer, and then copy it to a front buffer where it is masked by a bitmap that just has black squares where the ads used to be. That doesn't "change the original, copyrighted document", so it should be fine. And I presume putting that vase in front of your screen is still acceptable, even in Germany.
If publishers want more control, they always have the option of downloading the entire page as a bitmap.
And of course it’s Axel Springer and Matthias Döpfner again, the „stirrup holders“ of the AfD.
sneak•5mo ago
The problem is that the fundamental concept of IP is nonsensical and insane. When applied rationally, it will of course result in wacky results like this.
drunner•5mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•5mo ago
trenchpilgrim•5mo ago
You may encounter issues if you attempt to distribute the altered copy, but that's not at issue here.
3036e4•5mo ago
"The first press clipping agency in London was established in 1852 ... Early clipping services employed women to scan periodicals for mentions of specific names or terms. The marked periodicals were then cut out by men and pasted to dated slips. Women would then sort those slips and clippings to be sent to the services' clients".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_monitoring_service
tzs•5mo ago
See Mirage Editions v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341 (1988) [1] and Lee v. A.R.T. Co., 125 F.3d 580 (1997) [2].
The first, in the 9th circuit, involved a company whose business was:
> 1) purchasing artwork prints or books including good quality artwork page prints therein; 2) gluing each individual print or page print onto a rectangular sheet of black plastic material exposing a narrow black margin around the print; 3) gluing the black sheet with print onto a major surface of a rectangular white ceramic tile; 4) applying a transparent plastic film over the print, black sheet and ceramic tile surface; and 5) offering the tile with artwork mounted thereon for sale in the retail market.
The appeals court found that this was a copyright infringement.
The second, in the 7th circuit, involved the same defendants who bought an artists' notecards and small lithographs from a retail art store and:
> mounted the works on ceramic tiles (covering the art with transparent epoxy resin in the process) and resold the tiles.
The 7th circuit found that this was not an infringement.
There were some differences in the cases, in particular in the 9th circuit case the defendant was buying art books and cutting out the pictures to mount and sell but in the second case they were buying individual notecards and lithographs to mount and sell.
As far as I know this has never reached the Supreme Court, and neither case has been overturned in its circuit by subsequent cases in that circuit, and so Mirage is still the law in the 9th and Lee still the law in the 7th. In other circuits there have been district court cases that dealt with this issue, but it has not reached their appellate courts.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/856...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/125...
mnw21cam•5mo ago
ballenf•5mo ago
3036e4•5mo ago
Ebooks sadly are different. I only buy DRM-free ebooks that grant me rights similar to what always exists for printed books, but that sadly limits what ebooks I can buy quite significantly.
kstrauser•5mo ago
3036e4•5mo ago
kstrauser•5mo ago
I use to rip DVDs so I could watch them on my laptop. Same idea here; same lack of moral conundrum. I wouldn’t share copies of those things outside my household, in the same way that I’ll let my kid read my physical books but I’m not scanning and sharing them on my website. But for my own personal use? Of course. I own those copies.
NoMoreNicksLeft•5mo ago
Copyright is unfortunately like one of the supernatural demons. You draw the little chalk circle on the ground and voice the incantations, and you think you're in control. That it can't leave the circle. But once summoned, this demon does not go away, and it just ignores the circle... it's just a scribble in chalk. Then you run around gibbering forever, crying about how it should've worked, you should've been safe while ignoring that it's a demonic force hellbent on burning down the Library of Alexandria and plunging humanity into a new dark age. Reject copyright. You'll never get it to play nice. They always feel hungry, always trying to take more. Every book on the New York Times Book Review Notable 100 list is available for 4 minutes of your bandwidth. Every Hugo winner, every Pulitzer novel, ever Nobel winner, every trashy little magazine you liked to skim through when you had to go to the grocery store with mama as a kid, all the classics of antiquity, everything. They're right there, waiting for you.
sneak•5mo ago
Most people do not agree, in that they think arranging the magnetic fields in your drive to represent and store child pornography should be punishable.
It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.
NoMoreNicksLeft•5mo ago
I do not do that. Thus, the example is irrelevant. Though it might actually be a good example as to how people use excuses like that to violate others' liberty even when they're not engaged in that particular reprehensible activity. Even before you finished reading that sentence, the little "but you might" thought popped up in your head.
>It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.
I don't dispute that it is proscribed. I simply do not care. When copyright maximalists have to stoop to "what about child pornography" arguments, I think it is more than reasonable that people simply stop listening right at that point. Nothing else they say can or should ever matter.
sneak•5mo ago
I'm pointing out that under our current system, our society has banned storage of certain digital material. It is not inconsistent with our current system to expect other types of digital material to be banned similarly.
> I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business.
It's not just sequences of magnetic fields; it's what those magnetic fields represent that cause them to be legislated upon. Thus, your implied argument that you should be free to do whatever you wish simply because it's just magnetic fields on your own device (an argument I agree with 100%, fwiw) is not really a rebuttal in this case because our current system does not recognize or permit that right, and a majority of people in our society agree with that circumstance.
It's nothing whatsoever to do with what types of files you personally do or do not store. The CP example was simply an example of one type of banned magnetic field patterns. Another would be bulk stolen PII.
I actually agree with your viewpoint; but ours is a minority opinion that is not reflected in society or law. Even though there is no victim when a digital file is copied, a majority of people in our world do not want possession and distribution of certain files to be legal.
NoMoreNicksLeft•5mo ago
sneak•5mo ago
trenchpilgrim•5mo ago
slightwinder•5mo ago
sterlind•5mo ago
so it should be legal to install an ad block plugin, but not legal to run an ad-stripping proxy.
syntaxbush•5mo ago
sneak•5mo ago
It was created whole cloth as a legal fiction to prop up an industry that the legislature thought was worth propping up.
If you think about it, if search engines didn’t exist, and you invented and marketed one today, you’d be sued into oblivion. Same goes for public lending libraries.
trenchpilgrim•5mo ago