> developer of best-in-class ad-filtering technology found in millions of browsers and products around the world
I must admit, this is pretty funny... there is "ublock" which users are tricked into installing (instead of the real ublock origin), which uses their "acceptable ads"
and people have said that their business model is based on extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads
Yes, Eyeo is a dodgy company that misrepresents their product and how they actually really make money from users & advertisers.
As one of the largest ad blockers around they also try and extinguish any potential competition before it has a chance to establish itself.
When I initially released my ad blocker for the iPhone and Mac – Magic Lasso Adblock (https://www.magiclasso.co/) they attempted to stop its distribution through the Apple App Stores.
They sent legal threats directly to myself and then to Apple claiming that they own the term 'adblock' and demanded that my product stop using that term in any marketing or App Store keywords. This went on for months with them constantly pushing less and less plausible evidence for their ownership of the term.
I eventually told their enforcement loonies to stop contacting me and provided evidence to Apple that their claims are baseless (which meant their claims directly to Apple could also be ignored). They eventually stopped but I can see how their tactics could discourage any new entrants in the space.
That's ridiculous. They themselves adopted the Adblock term from the original open source project that they initially derived their product from (http://web.archive.org/web/20090222145638/http://adblockplus...). If any trademark exists for Adblock, it's probably not theirs.
Reminds me of https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/business/media-business-a... where a bunch of billboard owners in Times Square (New York City) tried to sue Sony over digitally replacing the advertisements in scenes in a Spiderman Movie. Luckily the judge in that case came to a similar conclusion.
I'm still dubious the city skylines can be copyrighted - NYC believes they own the copyright on the city's skyline. I'm also dubious that the NYC Subway can copyright the route indicators (letters in circles).
Going after photographers who have the subway signs in the background is one thing, but going after businesses for copying their font seems entirely different to me.
They're a corporation who paid a lot of money for the rights to it, how is is different than Walmart or Netflix going after companies for using their fonts?
I've helped on a few jobs that required representing the skyline of London (in advertising, for example) and my clients have always been very careful to ensure that modern landmarks aren't entirely accurate, to avoid this kind of complication.
Is "acceptable ads" really a bad thing? I'm not opposed to seeing any ads; I just don't want badly behaved ones. And is there a less bad alternative to accomplish that?
Because you can't choose what's acceptable, they do.
You won't decide the topic, format, quantity, density, duration, nature or interruption type. Which is different for you, me, or your children.
What's more, ads are not made for your benefit, ever, but to the benefit of the advertiser which may (but statistically more likely may not) align with yours.
And also because:
- the incentive gets twisted, which means you can't trust ublock on the long run.
- unkown unknowns means down the road, some ads will manage to track you or serve malicious content despite ublock filtering.
- ads paid content is a terrible business model which take a price people are not wired to assess nor realize they pay for something they disguise as free yet has an impact on the entire society. Not a great thing to encourage.
And I say all that as someone who gets revenue from ads.
As far as I'm concerned, all advertisers can go to hell. If a majority of advertisers had behaved themselves we would never have invented ad blockers[0] in the first place. This industry has proven time and time again that they are the scum of the fucking earth and cannot be trusted. I for one am tired of giving them any chances.
> I'm not opposed to seeing any ads; I just don't want badly behaved ones.
While I support this sentiment, a definition of "badly behaved ads" which is based on whether or not the advertiser paid money to some third party is just not a definition I can live with.
I think that is a legitimate question. The issue becomes there is no standard or method to ensure acceptable ads. A static ad without javascript is acceptable to me. Maybe not to someone else.
But ... the ad industry would never accept a static ad more akin to a billboard than a tracking device. Many times in the past malware has found its way into networks run by the more highly regarded ad systems.
Banksy said this in relation to billboard type ads but it applies to online advertising too. Is there an acceptable rock you would allow someone to throw at your head?
>Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
It seems complicated and pointless to keep an acceptable ads list, if I'm going to block some, why not block them all? While I only really care about blocking badly behaved ads, the easiest way to do so is to block all of them.
Also, the fact that they are taking money to get on the 'acceptable ads' list looks a little shady. It could be (let's be generous) misinterpreted as a third party just elbowing in to get a cut of the transaction, like some kind of protection racket. I'd worry this sort of thing might draw unwanted attention in some jurisdictions, even if it really isn't warranted.
Why bother going with the solution that is both technically and ethically more complicated? Just do the dumb thing and block everything.
For you, this might be a great solution. I think most people who install an adblocker do it because they don't want to see any ads, so it defeats the purpose.
BUT as the definition of acceptable is not in the hands of the accepting receiver but in the hands of the sender the word acceptable is used in a twisted manner. You are told it is acceptable but their behavior will be driven by forces yielding anything but acceptable.
Ignore what they say - their behavior matters and incentives are stacked against your interests with no effective limits.
I think so. You ask a server for something and it bundles that thing with other bits crafted to make you do something other than what you originally contacted the server for.
It might exploit a buffer overflow or it might exploit a distractable human, but it's malware just the same.
"Acceptable" for whom? After AdBlock made their acceptable ads deal with Google, they whitelisted stuff like sexy girls and misinfo videos in the Recommended Videos side-list on YouTube. Fake Ublock is probably the same way.
Inflamatory statements aside, and whether or not online advertising is acceptable in its current form, there is a need they are fulfilling. If people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience then people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience, period. You can argue why all you want, in the meantime, ABP is there to get rid of them for you.
Feels like a bad time to bite the hand that was willing to defend a precedent that serves everyone (if publishers were successful there, they'd have a much easier time arguing in other countries for "harmonization" legislation).
Precedent or not, they have no ability to enforce any of such ridiculous claim had it gone the other way, it's like certain governments trying to 'ban' encryption.
Historically, it always seemed like it was one company though as Adblock codebase has been based on Adblock plus codebase for years, and they both use Acceptable ads.
AdBlock Plus and uBlock are owned by the same company, uBlock is not uBlock Origin, and the history is confusing.
µBlock/uBlock was the original, released in 2014 by Gorhill. In 2015, fed up with support request, he transferred the project to Chris Aljoudi. He then forked his own project, most likely due to a disagreement over donations, it became uBlock Origin. Eventually most people moved from uBlock to the better maintained uBlock Origin. Eyeo eventually bought uBlock and added their "acceptable ads" option.
So you can't say that uBlock is a fake, it is actually the original project. But the one made by the original author is uBlock Origin.
Yes it is confusing, but whatever, get uBlock Origin.
They allow certain search engines’ search-ads to pass through for a nominal fee. Those search engines happily support Eyeo because it’s easier to have a single, friendly, and known enemy that dominates the market.
They charge advertisers to be part of their 'acceptable ads' scheme that then allows these ads to be shown to users of their ad blocking products (ADP, Adblock Plus, Ublock).
I'm confused. The HTML on a page should be automatically copyrighted to the author already. It's absolutely an expression of creative work just like a book, or software, or music.
That being said, it doesn't follow that it would make it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance. You are free to modify copyrighted works as long as you don't distribute that work.
I think the argument would be that a browser add-on, such as an ad-blocker, is essentially redistributing the work because it is modifying the HTML of another author and then displaying it to the browser user. Of course it is really the browser user who is doing the modifying - the extension is just their tool - I'm not sure if that is the basis of the ruling.
The way I see it, an ad-blocker is like a bottle of white-out. Say you buy a book and take it home, inside the book you find ads on various pages so you take your bottle of white-out and mark them out. You haven't caused any copyright infringement because you're not redistributing your book that has the white-out on it.
> is essentially redistributing the work because it is modifying the HTML of another author and then displaying it to the browser user
There are still only two legal entities involved - the operator of the web site, and the user displaying a page from the web site. What's the third entity that would redistribute a modified work to the user displaying a page from the web site?
Interesting. So could I publish a modified book, by publishing a piece of software, that transforms a known book into a new book. Then the user would be doing the modification.
Would that not be legal, as long as my software doesn't contain pieces of the original book copied verbatim?
> You are free to modify copyrighted works as long as you don't distribute that work.
That's...not quite right.
You are free to modify a legally owned physical copy of a copyrighted work (and to redistribute that modified copy), but you are not free to make a derivative work by copying-with-modifications, except (in the US) insofar as that falls within the bounds of fair use (and where it does, you can also distribute it.)
Modifying the HTML via a browser extension makes creates a derivative work that Axel Springer was claiming infringes on their rights as the original author.
Creating the derivative work in itself would indeed not be a problem but further distribution of that derived work would be a problem. Axel Springer seems to have been arguing that it is the extension developer that is responsible for "distributing" that modified work to the user.
The court seems to have decided that instead this falls under what in US law would probably be called fair use that happens after the user has received a copy of the content instead of a new content that you (using the extension) created. All very logical of course but the law is not always that logical.
> That being said, it doesn't follow that it would make it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance.
I think the page owners tried to argue that the page presented to the viewer was a single creative work / piece of art and that the ad blockers where defacing/misrepresenting that piece of art . As I understand the court basically decided that the final composition of the page lacked an overreaching creative process required to qualify.
> The HTML on a page should be automatically copyrighted to the author already.
It seems the language is backwards; it's not that the HTML document is not copyrightable but rather the resulting web page constructed by your browser from that HTML which is not copyrightable.
Just taking a minute here to say that Eyeo went on a copyright offensive to all ad blockers with "ad block" in the name saying it infringed on their brand.
Very bad actors in this space, and their motivation here in this suit is to continue their AdBlock racket of allowing ads to their users for those advertisers that pay.
Absolutely agree that they're bad actors, but it's also unfair to say "motivation here in this suit" when they were defendants who chose not to settle based on a good chance of prevailing on the merits as they did. If we vilify parties for defending themselves in court, even when we disagree with their choices, we make it ever so slightly more possible for might to define right.
> The 2021 copyright lawsuit was brought against eyeo by Axel Springer [... and] was a new challenge to a 2018 Federal Court case, also brought against eyeo by Axel Springer, which was previously decided in favor of eyeo.
I'm nog allowed tot print a new copy of The Hobbit, due to copyright.
However, if I buy a legal copy of the Hobbit and edit it using whiteout and pen that would be perfectly legal (as far as I understand). I could even sell my modified copy.
Isn't this basically what an in-browser ad filter does? Or is my understanding wrong here?
Somewhat offtopic trivia, but up until 2012 in the US, you were actually allowed to print a new copy of The Hobbit. Many publishers with no relationship to Tolkien or his estate have done this. Due to a quirk in international copyright law, it had entered the public domain in the US.
A court ruling in 2012 restored copyright to the work, which is super weird since there are a lot of unauthorized copies still floating around.
This sounded far too intriguing to not google a bit. I'm guessing you're talking about this?
> J.R.R. Tolkien first tangled with copyright law in the mid-1960s when ACE Books discovered that the copyrights for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had not been properly secured in the United States by his American publisher. ACE Books opportunistically published unauthorized paperback editions of those books in the United States. Until that time Tolkien’s books had only been available in hardback. Tolkien and his publishers reacted quickly by publishing their own authorized paperback editions, but in order to secure copyright in the United States again Tolkien was forced to revise both stories (thus confusing the issue of what is canonical in Middle-earth for his readers).
> There remained a question over the status of the ACE Books edition until several years ago, when a long-running complaint by the Tolkien Estate was finally settled with payment to the author’s heirs. Until that time some people in the entertainment and publishing industry argued that there was still a copyright “hole” pertaining to Tolkien’s works in the United States.
I'm mildly skeptical that a court would accept this reasoning in cases of works with many copies and someone making a change to one such personal copy.
You forgot the important, the moral part is only enforced if: “the modification in question does not have to be detrimental to the author's honor or reputation in order to qualify as a violation of the right of integrity.”
If you made software that took a legally obtained copy of "The Hobbit", modified it locally according to a scripted patch, then displayed that to the user, then that would be similar. Adblocking happens locally. This is similar to game mods.
This example actually popped up in my Patent class. This is what I remembered.
You are allowed to create a copy (and thus also in printed form) of copyrighted material, _only_ for private and personal use. i.e you _must_ recreate it yourself.
As for selling a modified version, if it isn't modified enough than you still infringe copyright of the original author. With "enough" being something that needs to be defended in court if challenged.
> As for selling a modified version, if it isn't modified enough than you still infringe copyright of the original author. With "enough" being something that needs to be defended in court if challenged.
Hang on. Does "modified version" mean the same physical copy I bought and then modified, or a copy I made myself and then modified?
The way you worded that sounds like you're talking about both, but the former makes no sense. Why would it be a copyright violation to buy a book, white-out one sentence, and resell it? And elsjaako was definitely talking about the former.
That reminds me of the PureFlix case years ago. Their shtick was editing movies to be more "Christian-friendly". So what they did was heavily edit a movie and burn it to a disk and ship it to you. What they did was they also bought a legit copy of the movie on disk and damaged the disk to unusuable. They shipped you both, so you had a working edited disk and a broken original.
IIRC, they lost the case but I do see the merits in their arguments.
Can you have your kid or personal assistant do that for you?
Over-the-trope example: A wealthy old English aristocrat's head butler brings in his master's evening paper at the kitchen door. Then snips out any stories "which might disagree with master's digestion", before presenting the paper to the old blue blood.
Metaphors don't work here. Real browser pages have code which could conceivably have EULAs, plus you may be in a EULA for a paid service, you have cookie agreements involved (and a similar question could be raised, is your browser obligated to return cookies once given?), the page may also already be interactive (if modifying a page is stipulated to be wrong, what about browser automation driving something "intended" to be manual process? There are contracts the page provider has with their advertisers. Things other than the end-user or page provider may already have had their fingers in the pie (ISPs blocking specific pages, even replacing ads with their own in the network). There's a lot of parties involved in a modern page with all sorts of relationships to each other. There's also a scale here; it's one thing to modify your own copy of a book but if you provide a service that modifies other people's copies (computer style, with virtually no effort in a fraction of a second), how is that different from publishing a modified copy? What impact do those differences have on the question?
All of these things are important and none translate into the book, or any other simple physical metaphor.
My summary answer would be that the status of ad blocking legally is deeply unclear if you really start analyzing it, in all sorts of ways, in ways that different legal jurisdictions will almost certainly rule differently on for all the different individual questions, and almost certainly with no coherence between the individual rulings.
This is only about copyright and copyright only applies to distribution of materials. You are free to modify any copyrighted work for your own purposes as long as you don't distribute your modifications. Distribution is the key.
Or, you can buy a ClearPlay DVD player (and, I guess they make Bluray players now too). RCA had a similar device as well, but I think it vanished from the market.
It's a DVD player with a service that downloads timecodes to skip all the naughty bits in movies that you play on it.
You can sell your copy, no matter what you have done to it, at least by the First Sale Doctrine in the US, and similar elsewhere.
What you can't do is sell the rights to the modified work, since they're in addition to the original work. When/if the copyright in the original expires, then you can (and you will have your own copyright in the modifications if they're substantial enough).
Crucially, you also can't make any copies of the modified work and sell or distribute them, so your derivative will be a legally-enforced one-off.
It doesn't mean that you can't profit from your modification of another's work (maybe someone will pay for your marginalia), but it does mean that you can't profit from the unauthorized duplication of another's work while their copyright subsists.
What an absurd case, so glad it would found in Eyeo's favour.
> More dangerous still, any developer who writes code for an offending browser feature could be liable to pay damages
If you take this one step further, any browser vendor would be liable for changes to their product if that change broke a person's site, i.e. deprecation of any features. The mind boggles at how horrific it could've been for the future of the web.
And worse yet, imagine you're liable for not supporting each and every new web standard that there is 100%, right away. Just to illustrate how absurd such a ruling would have been.
Does this have any equivalent to US laws or was it at all a departure from German law? I don't see what the precedent is, everything thinks the topic they care about is so important when its not.
The claims were 1) that HTML of a page is copyrighted 2) so therefore browser extensions that modify it are a problem
If I read this correctly, the court curbstomped 2) because thats silly while not needing to address 1) because thats true but has nothing to do with what a browser extension does.
Couldn't this had been dismissed since there is nothing new at all? was there really ever a risk of anything different occurring? what a waste of time
I see that as correct decision. Yes, sure the HTML of a page is copyrighted work.
But the 2 following from that is bit weird. I couldn't take magazine cut it up and make something new? Or a book? Or maybe I have ebook reader and I couldn't change the font and size?
Not sure of anything equivalent, but the whole case does not make much sense.
In my opinion its quite simple:
The Landgericht Hamburg is known for its incredible ineptitude and a tendency to decide in favor of the likes of Springer and other internet/tech adverse entities.
I assume, Springer which a massive publisher of Fox News style garbage like Bild (colloquially known as Blöd), tried to capitalize on that ineptitude.
It looks like Axel Springer was trying to assert that the user's own software on their own client device was creating derivative works on behalf of companies like eyeo. Just because eyeo wrote the software that I may or may not choose to use on my device does not mean and IMO should not be taken to mean that eyeo is republishing anything for my consumption. I'm just using my copy of the web page that I obtained legally from the web server with software I choose to use which may display things differently from how the publisher of the page intends.
Germany does not have the notion of copyright like in the Anglo-American legal system, so I guess it's basically only applicable in Germany and countries where they do have the same regulations
Germany has copyright laws like virtually all countries do, and it was party to the Berne Convention.
Its copyright laws are in the Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte. It just doesn't call them that. The main difference I believe is that they're not totally transferable and it doesn't have the work for hire doctrine, but it gives the author of a work the exclusive right to reproduce that work, i.e., the right to copy it and to delegate that right.
Continental copyright is actually a bit stronger than Anglo-American copyright because it draws from the concept of authors' rights, the moral right of an author to control how their work is exhibited (because the work is tied up with the author's reputation). Hence why essential aspects of American copyright law, like public domain and fair use, are leas developed or missing in non-Anglo Western Europe.
Had Axel Springer won the case, it sounds like it would have become illegal to scribble marginalia, highlight, or otherwise alter the copyrighted content of books I own.
They were trying to make the argument that they html was copyright and thus modifying and redistributing it (IE removing the ads) without license was infringing. The entirety of the consideration was whether programmatically removing ads in the page before serving it to the user consisted of redistribution or reproduction.
Definitely a stretch attempt at interpretation but not surprising and not at all unreasonable.
Your analogy isn't fully sane - You bought the book you're scribbling in, and have the right to deface that copy as you please, and even resell that copy. You may not reprint it with a word whited out and offer it for reproduction or distribution as your own.
This side of copyright law is very well established and not ambiguous.
Not really. They're claiming that it isn't the _user_ that's scribbling on the HTML page, which is why their HTML (their customers' HTML specifically) is different from books.
Perhaps it would have limited libraries from re-lending books that a patron scribbled on. But not automatically, it would require a second court case.
HTML as served from the server can be owned by the publisher. I'm fine with that. Just don't tell me how I can view it and use information from it once I have my copy you've allowed me to download onto my machine.
What Axel Springer was trying to do is equivalent to telling a magazine subscriber they can't cut a couch out of an interior design magazine and paste it on a poster board with the wallpaper from another magazine to plan their own room. That's not how copyright works. My copy is my copy.
Readit News
I must admit, this is pretty funny... there is "ublock" which users are tricked into installing (instead of the real ublock origin), which uses their "acceptable ads"
and people have said that their business model is based on extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads
As one of the largest ad blockers around they also try and extinguish any potential competition before it has a chance to establish itself.
When I initially released my ad blocker for the iPhone and Mac – Magic Lasso Adblock (https://www.magiclasso.co/) they attempted to stop its distribution through the Apple App Stores.
They sent legal threats directly to myself and then to Apple claiming that they own the term 'adblock' and demanded that my product stop using that term in any marketing or App Store keywords. This went on for months with them constantly pushing less and less plausible evidence for their ownership of the term.
I eventually told their enforcement loonies to stop contacting me and provided evidence to Apple that their claims are baseless (which meant their claims directly to Apple could also be ignored). They eventually stopped but I can see how their tactics could discourage any new entrants in the space.
I'm still dubious the city skylines can be copyrighted - NYC believes they own the copyright on the city's skyline. I'm also dubious that the NYC Subway can copyright the route indicators (letters in circles).
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-por...
http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-intellectu...
They're a corporation who paid a lot of money for the rights to it, how is is different than Walmart or Netflix going after companies for using their fonts?
Deleted Comment
Because you can't choose what's acceptable, they do.
You won't decide the topic, format, quantity, density, duration, nature or interruption type. Which is different for you, me, or your children.
What's more, ads are not made for your benefit, ever, but to the benefit of the advertiser which may (but statistically more likely may not) align with yours.
And also because:
- the incentive gets twisted, which means you can't trust ublock on the long run.
- unkown unknowns means down the road, some ads will manage to track you or serve malicious content despite ublock filtering.
- ads paid content is a terrible business model which take a price people are not wired to assess nor realize they pay for something they disguise as free yet has an impact on the entire society. Not a great thing to encourage.
And I say all that as someone who gets revenue from ads.
[0] pop up blockers, originally
While I support this sentiment, a definition of "badly behaved ads" which is based on whether or not the advertiser paid money to some third party is just not a definition I can live with.
But ... the ad industry would never accept a static ad more akin to a billboard than a tracking device. Many times in the past malware has found its way into networks run by the more highly regarded ad systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
If a content publisher refuses to let people read articles without a subscription or with an ad blocker, I am ok with that. It is their choice.
I've seen websites ask me to disable my ad blocker when I only have Privacy Badger enabled (on top of Firefox's built-in behaviour).
>Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Also, the fact that they are taking money to get on the 'acceptable ads' list looks a little shady. It could be (let's be generous) misinterpreted as a third party just elbowing in to get a cut of the transaction, like some kind of protection racket. I'd worry this sort of thing might draw unwanted attention in some jurisdictions, even if it really isn't warranted.
Why bother going with the solution that is both technically and ethically more complicated? Just do the dumb thing and block everything.
BUT as the definition of acceptable is not in the hands of the accepting receiver but in the hands of the sender the word acceptable is used in a twisted manner. You are told it is acceptable but their behavior will be driven by forces yielding anything but acceptable.
Ignore what they say - their behavior matters and incentives are stacked against your interests with no effective limits.
It might exploit a buffer overflow or it might exploit a distractable human, but it's malware just the same.
i mean, it is. ABP is basically modern day protection racket
Inflamatory statements aside, and whether or not online advertising is acceptable in its current form, there is a need they are fulfilling. If people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience then people don't find ads to be hospitable to their user experience, period. You can argue why all you want, in the meantime, ABP is there to get rid of them for you.
In this case they're a middle man between the abusers and the abused, so I think it's more like prostitution.
https://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke...
Historically, it always seemed like it was one company though as Adblock codebase has been based on Adblock plus codebase for years, and they both use Acceptable ads.
Edit to avoid confusion: Fake "uBlock" (not to be confused with uBlock Origin) is owned by AdBlock https://www.ublock.org/blog/an-update-on-ublock/
µBlock/uBlock was the original, released in 2014 by Gorhill. In 2015, fed up with support request, he transferred the project to Chris Aljoudi. He then forked his own project, most likely due to a disagreement over donations, it became uBlock Origin. Eventually most people moved from uBlock to the better maintained uBlock Origin. Eyeo eventually bought uBlock and added their "acceptable ads" option.
So you can't say that uBlock is a fake, it is actually the original project. But the one made by the original author is uBlock Origin.
Yes it is confusing, but whatever, get uBlock Origin.
How does Eyeo make money?
They charge advertisers to be part of their 'acceptable ads' scheme that then allows these ads to be shown to users of their ad blocking products (ADP, Adblock Plus, Ublock).
That being said, it doesn't follow that it would make it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance. You are free to modify copyrighted works as long as you don't distribute that work.
But ... that's what the browser itself does. We aren't shown raw HTML, we're shown a user-friendly rendering of that HTML.
There are still only two legal entities involved - the operator of the web site, and the user displaying a page from the web site. What's the third entity that would redistribute a modified work to the user displaying a page from the web site?
Would that not be legal, as long as my software doesn't contain pieces of the original book copied verbatim?
Dead Comment
That's...not quite right.
You are free to modify a legally owned physical copy of a copyrighted work (and to redistribute that modified copy), but you are not free to make a derivative work by copying-with-modifications, except (in the US) insofar as that falls within the bounds of fair use (and where it does, you can also distribute it.)
Creating the derivative work in itself would indeed not be a problem but further distribution of that derived work would be a problem. Axel Springer seems to have been arguing that it is the extension developer that is responsible for "distributing" that modified work to the user.
The court seems to have decided that instead this falls under what in US law would probably be called fair use that happens after the user has received a copy of the content instead of a new content that you (using the extension) created. All very logical of course but the law is not always that logical.
I think the page owners tried to argue that the page presented to the viewer was a single creative work / piece of art and that the ad blockers where defacing/misrepresenting that piece of art . As I understand the court basically decided that the final composition of the page lacked an overreaching creative process required to qualify.
> The HTML on a page should be automatically copyrighted to the author already.
<html> . Take that internet I own you now.
Bollocks. It's a data markup language.
Very bad actors in this space, and their motivation here in this suit is to continue their AdBlock racket of allowing ads to their users for those advertisers that pay.
> The 2021 copyright lawsuit was brought against eyeo by Axel Springer [... and] was a new challenge to a 2018 Federal Court case, also brought against eyeo by Axel Springer, which was previously decided in favor of eyeo.
Deleted Comment
However, if I buy a legal copy of the Hobbit and edit it using whiteout and pen that would be perfectly legal (as far as I understand). I could even sell my modified copy.
Isn't this basically what an in-browser ad filter does? Or is my understanding wrong here?
A court ruling in 2012 restored copyright to the work, which is super weird since there are a lot of unauthorized copies still floating around.
> J.R.R. Tolkien first tangled with copyright law in the mid-1960s when ACE Books discovered that the copyrights for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had not been properly secured in the United States by his American publisher. ACE Books opportunistically published unauthorized paperback editions of those books in the United States. Until that time Tolkien’s books had only been available in hardback. Tolkien and his publishers reacted quickly by publishing their own authorized paperback editions, but in order to secure copyright in the United States again Tolkien was forced to revise both stories (thus confusing the issue of what is canonical in Middle-earth for his readers).
> There remained a question over the status of the ACE Books edition until several years ago, when a long-running complaint by the Tolkien Estate was finally settled with payment to the author’s heirs. Until that time some people in the entertainment and publishing industry argued that there was still a copyright “hole” pertaining to Tolkien’s works in the United States.
Source: https://middle-earth.xenite.org/why-are-some-people-sued-ove...
Authors have "moral rights of integrity" over their work, which means you can't modify a work without permission of the author, even if you own it.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Moral_right_of_int...
You are allowed to create a copy (and thus also in printed form) of copyrighted material, _only_ for private and personal use. i.e you _must_ recreate it yourself.
As for selling a modified version, if it isn't modified enough than you still infringe copyright of the original author. With "enough" being something that needs to be defended in court if challenged.
Hang on. Does "modified version" mean the same physical copy I bought and then modified, or a copy I made myself and then modified?
The way you worded that sounds like you're talking about both, but the former makes no sense. Why would it be a copyright violation to buy a book, white-out one sentence, and resell it? And elsjaako was definitely talking about the former.
IIRC, they lost the case but I do see the merits in their arguments.
Over-the-trope example: A wealthy old English aristocrat's head butler brings in his master's evening paper at the kitchen door. Then snips out any stories "which might disagree with master's digestion", before presenting the paper to the old blue blood.
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All of these things are important and none translate into the book, or any other simple physical metaphor.
My summary answer would be that the status of ad blocking legally is deeply unclear if you really start analyzing it, in all sorts of ways, in ways that different legal jurisdictions will almost certainly rule differently on for all the different individual questions, and almost certainly with no coherence between the individual rulings.
It's a DVD player with a service that downloads timecodes to skip all the naughty bits in movies that you play on it.
Could you? I don’t find that at all obvious.
What you can't do is sell the rights to the modified work, since they're in addition to the original work. When/if the copyright in the original expires, then you can (and you will have your own copyright in the modifications if they're substantial enough).
Crucially, you also can't make any copies of the modified work and sell or distribute them, so your derivative will be a legally-enforced one-off.
It doesn't mean that you can't profit from your modification of another's work (maybe someone will pay for your marginalia), but it does mean that you can't profit from the unauthorized duplication of another's work while their copyright subsists.
> More dangerous still, any developer who writes code for an offending browser feature could be liable to pay damages
If you take this one step further, any browser vendor would be liable for changes to their product if that change broke a person's site, i.e. deprecation of any features. The mind boggles at how horrific it could've been for the future of the web.
The claims were 1) that HTML of a page is copyrighted 2) so therefore browser extensions that modify it are a problem
If I read this correctly, the court curbstomped 2) because thats silly while not needing to address 1) because thats true but has nothing to do with what a browser extension does.
Couldn't this had been dismissed since there is nothing new at all? was there really ever a risk of anything different occurring? what a waste of time
But the 2 following from that is bit weird. I couldn't take magazine cut it up and make something new? Or a book? Or maybe I have ebook reader and I couldn't change the font and size?
In my opinion its quite simple:
The Landgericht Hamburg is known for its incredible ineptitude and a tendency to decide in favor of the likes of Springer and other internet/tech adverse entities.
I assume, Springer which a massive publisher of Fox News style garbage like Bild (colloquially known as Blöd), tried to capitalize on that ineptitude.
So it is quite remarkable that Springer failed.
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Its copyright laws are in the Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte. It just doesn't call them that. The main difference I believe is that they're not totally transferable and it doesn't have the work for hire doctrine, but it gives the author of a work the exclusive right to reproduce that work, i.e., the right to copy it and to delegate that right.
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Definitely a stretch attempt at interpretation but not surprising and not at all unreasonable.
Your analogy isn't fully sane - You bought the book you're scribbling in, and have the right to deface that copy as you please, and even resell that copy. You may not reprint it with a word whited out and offer it for reproduction or distribution as your own.
This side of copyright law is very well established and not ambiguous.
Perhaps it would have limited libraries from re-lending books that a patron scribbled on. But not automatically, it would require a second court case.
What Axel Springer was trying to do is equivalent to telling a magazine subscriber they can't cut a couch out of an interior design magazine and paste it on a poster board with the wallpaper from another magazine to plan their own room. That's not how copyright works. My copy is my copy.