from the not-this-fucking-nonsense-again dept
It’s no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or “an attack on free speech” get trotted out every so often, and they’re always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That’s an important freedom. And that means you should be able to install apps that protect you from potentially malicious content. Or from anything at all. It’s your computer. It’s your browser.
But publishers will bend over backwards to argue otherwise. And for years they’ve been doing so in Germany especially, relying on that country’s truly ridiculous copyright laws. Germany’s Axel Springer, one of the largest media orgs in Germany, has been on the warpath against ad blocking going back at least a decade. They and others kept taking ad blockers to court. And losing. Over and over again. But the German legal system never seems to come out with final precedential rulings, so past wins—even those at the Supreme Court—never quite seem final.
Back in 2022, we thought maybe the issue was finally over, with yet another German court saying that ad blocking does not infringe on copyright.
But apparently claiming that ad blocking infringes on copyright in Germany is a kind of legal zombie that never, ever dies. It just comes back again, once again trying to take a big bite out of the basic concepts of the open internet.
Last month, Germany’s Federal Supreme Court (the BGH) decided to partially overturn a lower court’s sensible ruling and reopen this can of worms. The court is now asking whether modifying a website’s Document Object Model (DOM) or Cascading Style Sheets—which is exactly what ad blockers and countless other browser extensions do—constitutes copyright infringement.
Let’s be crystal clear about what this means. If this logic holds, then basically any browser extension that changes how you experience the web could theoretically infringe someone’s copyright. As Mozilla’s Daniel Nazer points out in an excellent blog post breaking down the implications:
Imagine you are watching television and you go to the kitchen for a snack during an ad break. Or you press the fast-forward button to skip some ads while listening to a podcast. Or perhaps you get a newspaper delivered to your house, and you see that it includes a special section made up of hallucinated AI content, so you drop the inset into the trash before taking the rest of the paper inside. Were these acts of copyright infringement? Of course not. But if you do something like this with a browser extension, a recent decision from the German Federal Supreme Court suggests that maybe you did infringe copyright. This misguided logic risks user freedom, privacy, and security.
Think about the absurdity of this for a second. Using your browser’s built-in reader mode? Potentially copyright infringement. Changing the font size because you have vision issues? Maybe infringement too. Installing a dark mode extension because you don’t want to burn your retinas? Better call a lawyer first.
This isn’t just about ad blocking, though that’s obviously the specific target here. As Mozilla notes, there are countless legitimate reasons users might want their browser to modify how a webpage appears:
There are many reasons, in addition to ad blocking, that users might want their browser or a browser extension to alter a webpage. These include changes to improve accessibility, to evaluate accessibility, or to protect privacy. Indeed, the risks of browsing range from phishing, to malicious code execution, to invasive tracking, to fingerprinting, to more mundane harms like inefficient website elements that waste processing resources. Users should be equipped with browsers and browser extensions that give them both protection and choice in the face of these risks. A browser that inflexibly ran any code served to the user would be an extraordinarily dangerous piece of software. Ad blockers are just one piece of this puzzle, but they are an important way that users can customize their experience and lower risks to their security and privacy.
The stakes here are enormous. If German courts decide that users don’t have the right to control how web content displays on their own machines, it would represent a fundamental break from how the web has always worked. It would essentially give publishers veto power over user choice and innovation in browser technology.
And let’s not forget who’s behind this: Axel Springer, the same company that has spent years trying to break the internet through things like the EU’s link tax. This is the same publisher that thinks Google should pay them for the privilege of sending them traffic. Their track record on understanding how the internet works—or should work—is abysmal.
As Mozilla warns, if Germany becomes the second country (after China) to effectively ban ad blockers, it could:
… significantly limit users’ ability to control their online environment and potentially open the door to similar restrictions elsewhere. Such a precedent could embolden legal challenges against other extensions that protect privacy, enhance accessibility, or improve security. Over time, this could deter innovation in these areas, pressure browser vendors to limit extension functionality, and shift the internet away from its open, user-driven nature toward one with reduced flexibility, innovation, and control for users.
The most maddening part? We already know how this plays out. Courts have looked at this question repeatedly and consistently concluded that ad blocking is legal. The court rulings in the past got it exactly right when they noted that HTML files aren’t actually changed by ad blockers—they just affect how browsers process and display that content. As the court ruling in 2022 sensibly observed, “It would also represent a disproportionate encroachment on the user’s freedom of action if it were not up to the user to decide whether and how to execute a legally acquired program.”
But here we are, yet again, apparently because some publishers can’t accept that users have agency over their own computing devices.
The case will continue to drag on, which means we’re in for more rounds of this tiresome debate. But the principle at stake couldn’t be clearer: Users should have the right to control their own browsing experience, and that includes using software that blocks, modifies, or filters content according to their preferences.
If German courts decide otherwise, they won’t just be making a mistake about copyright law—they’ll be helping to break the open web itself.
Filed Under: adblock, adblocking, browsers, copyright, germany
Companies: adblock, axel springer, eyeo, mozilla
