Pale Moon forum

Did you know that using an ad blocker is a criminal act and thus you infringe copright by changing the programming code of websites?
Well, at least according to Axel Springer.
Take care.

German publisher Axel Springer is suing the company behind Adblock Plus for copyright infringement. According to the company, which owns Bild and Die Welt, among others, ad blockers endanger digital journalism and "change the programming code of websites."

source

Nonsense, because you aren't republishing the content.

The ultimative nonsense is the claim that you "change the programming code of websites".
Obviously the head of media law at Axel Springer has no idea what he is bubbling about.

Good luck changing the programming code of a website on a server by viewing a page in a browser

Also, I'm pretty sure by publishing content you allow end-users to consume it in whatever way suits them, even if it's not "as the web author intended it". So this whole case has no basis, shouldn't even get to court and be dismissed out of hand by any sane judge.

If web ads weren't filled with heavy scripts doing all kind of garbage, purposedly designed to be misleading, possibly play an annoying audio without providing a mute button, and probably have some other properties I didn't think of, ad blockers wouldn't be necessary.

vannilla wrote:If web ads weren't filled with heavy scripts doing all kind of garbage, purposedly designed to be misleading, possibly play an annoying audio without providing a mute button, and probably have some other properties I didn't think of, ad blockers wouldn't be necessary.

I agree. there's nothing wrong with just simple display ads. Which is also why I've always restricted my own advertising needs to it.
But annoying slide-ins, pop-ins, pop-unders, full-page overlay, in-stream, interstitial, video, etc. ads can all go to hell.

Bull! Using copyright as a weapon!

With such poor reasoning given, it sounds more like a desperate attempt to shut down ad blockers by the publisher.

hujan86 wrote:With such poor reasoning given, it sounds more like a desperate attempt to shut down ad blockers by the publisher.

That's exactly what it is. "Oh noes we put ads on our website and we saw a nice increase but now people are blocking them! What do we do! Moar Ads to compensate! Oh noes now even more people block them! Let's attack the blockers!"

Adblock Plus even lent a hand to the advertisers, by giving them the ability to create "Acceptable Ads". Apparently they don't want to take it though.

According to the sourcelink sub-articles, Eyeo were sued earlier for the "Acceptable Ads" model too by said publisher, for somehow unfair, "different treatment" and one lower local court confirmed an abuse of competitive rights by Eyeo, while the next higher court cancelled that decision to not valid.

In the last 3 or 4 years most of the big size publishers have introduced large Anti-AdBlock overlays or article paywalls on their sites and they are the ones who really spam you off. I don't visit them anymore and I don't regret it, as they are also known for low quality "journalism", poor "news stories" and stupid entertainment. Good thing: I found some smaller and more serious news sites with a really acceptable level of ads -like on palemoon.org -, where I don't need the block switch. Proof enough, that some publishers and designers understand the word "acceptable" and others do not.

vannilla wrote:If web ads weren't filled with heavy scripts doing all kind of garbage, purposedly designed to be misleading, possibly play an annoying audio without providing a mute button, and probably have some other properties I didn't think of, ad blockers wouldn't be necessary.

Couldn't agree more. I allow ads on some sites such as PaleMoon's site and GHacks because they use small and sensible ads. Then I've visited others that have pleaded with me to disable my ad-blocker, I've tried it with the ad-blocker disabled and watched as the site takes ages to load, hundreds of calls to numerous other servers, jerky scrolling due to the amount of scripting on the site, content jumping around as ads load in the middle of the article, auto-playing videos with sound, Javascript popups, etc. etc. In these cases, the ad-blocker goes back on and the pleading message is dismissed.

In short, make your website perform like crap and I'll disable ads to make the site usable (more than anything else).

Claiming however that this is copyright infringement is similar to claiming that I'm infringing copyright by taking a song I've bought and applying ReplayGain to it (because I'm changing the MP3), or claiming copyright infringement if I scribble notes in one of my cookery books. It's ludicrous!

The reality is that users want to be able to read the articles without having ads in their faces instead. As long as website authors continue to use irresponsible ads that interfere with users consuming the content they publish, they deserve to be punished by having users block the ads.

Attacking adblockers instead is just underhandedly trying to force the "moar money" envelope.

What really needs to happen is that the ad industry stops trying to make misleading and attention-whore ads, and they should refuse to serve more than a few ads per page as well.
What we have today in the ad industry is akin to what would happen if we'd have Harry Potter like newspapers, but then having the moving pictures just be ads or even worse, preventing you from reading the article because they (literally) pop up over the text you want to read, or having the newspaper suddenly scream at you when you turn a page because there's a noisy ad there. Just imagine that in your head. Would you still read that newspaper? Unlikely.

Moonchild wrote:What we have today in the ad industry is akin to what would happen if we'd have Harry Potter like newspapers, but then having the moving pictures just be ads or even worse, preventing you from reading the article because they (literally) pop up over the text you want to read, or having the newspaper suddenly scream at you when you turn a page because there's a noisy ad there. Just imagine that in your head. Would you still read that newspaper? Unlikely.

The newspaper would also report back to the publisher, the ministry, and ten different advertising agencies about what pages you looked at and for how long, where your eyes were looking, what facial expression you were making at different times, your approximate location, and what the guy next to you was talking about.

First where from that mad abuse ads has come. Who makes trend and teach website makers to do sites piling up with scripts. Can one find any site of a company without all that.

Next they want their garbage cannot be declined, with the laughable cause this time. Then they likely must say that blocking ads is security danger.

I don't think anyone believes the propaganda coming from Axel Springer. I not only found it a non-argument that is only
used via rinse-and-repeat, without having any substance ot it; but also quite boring to have to read Springer-propaganda.

The much more annoying thing is how this became law in the EU. Now THAT was actually a concerted lobbyist attack
against the EU citizens. There must have been a lot of cash flow involved with this and it is, to me, more interesting
how this could work.