Piracy

Protecting web pages under the software/writing protection law is wrong. The software is the web-browser, the page is a medium, like paper is. There is rights protection for the text, there are patents for the ideas, but there is nothing protecting the paper, nor there is for the web page.

I don't get the problem with these anti-adblock ppl here.

• The web-server is under their control. They can, if they want to: not serve the content if the user decides to block the ad.
• The computer is under the control of the user and the user decides what they consider to be malware and what they don't.
  • If the user considers a website that pops up a colour chooser or a calculator to be a malicious website, they should have the right to block that particular website.
  • If the user considers any random website to be a malicious website, they get the right to block that website on their own personal internet connected machine.

And if blocking ads is considered illegal, then ignoring robots.txt is also illegal.

I don't use ad blockers, but I do use website blockers.
If I consider any site to be doing something I don't like, I just add them to the blacklist, regardless of whether or not they are an advertisement site.

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! @