Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal precedent for who ‘owns’ HTML

https://eyeo.com/eyeo-wins-copyright-court-case/

by rmoriz • 5 years ago

393 246 5 years ago

vmception• 5 years ago

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

wolfi1• 5 years ago

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

mminer2373• 5 years ago

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.

bitwize• 5 years ago

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.

qsort• 5 years ago

It wouldn't be the first time that something indefensibly stupid is afforded legal protection, see DRM.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

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?

LordHeini• 5 years ago

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.

So it is quite remarkable that Springer failed.

cestith2• 5 years ago

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.

RobertRoberts• 5 years ago

This doesn't have to win, it just needs to get discussed until enough corporations make a stink about this before extensions become "illegal".

Just like DRM, DCMA and many other total nonsense systems, they just need to "appear" like something is bad before Google/Firefox end all extensions entirely.

What is the defense for this?

armagon• 5 years ago

I think the defence is the market speaking. I'm not going to regularly use a browser that I can't do ad-blocking in (or, indeed, other extensions), and I'm not going to recommend it to other people. The browsers technically-minded people install for their family and friends do really make a difference.

blibble2• 5 years ago

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

detaro3• 5 years ago

Huh? What does eyeo have to do with uBlock? Adblock plus is their thing.

ajayyy3• 5 years ago

It is officially one "team" now https://eyeo.com/teaming-up-for-new-products-the-teams-behin...

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/

GuB-42• 5 years ago

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.

ballenf• 5 years ago

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).

1f60c• 5 years ago

Let's hope their lawyers don't read HN. :-)

gowld• 5 years ago

It's a good time to think about how to fund legal defense for free / open source software, and not rely on alliances with scammy companies.

Aperocky• 5 years ago

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.

whimsicalism4• 5 years ago

and people have said that their business model is based on extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads

i mean, it is. ABP is basically modern day protection racket

brezelgoring• 5 years ago

If it is, I like this 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.

__MatrixMan__3• 5 years ago

In a protection racket, you're paying for protection from the protectors, no third party involved.

In this case they're a middle man between the abusers and the abused, so I think it's more like prostitution.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

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?

karaterobot• 5 years ago

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.

mcherm• 5 years ago

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.

pgrote• 5 years ago

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.

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.

blibble2• 5 years ago

I wonder how many users install an product that claims to be an "ad blocker" so they can see different ads

radley• 5 years ago

"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.

grey_earthling• 5 years ago

Privacy Badger may be useful to you. It blocks trackers, which just so happens to prevent some ads from loading.

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).

__MatrixMan__3• 5 years ago

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.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

Yes, it's a bad thing.

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.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 5 years ago

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.

[0] pop up blockers, originally

notreallyserio• 5 years ago

The only ads I find acceptable are those served by the site itself. As soon as they load in a third party like Google, I'm out.

celticninja• 5 years ago

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.

bee_rider• 5 years ago

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.

heisenbit• 5 years ago

Not a bad thing as the word acceptable notes.

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.

zxcvbn4038• 5 years ago

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).

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-por...

http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-intellectu...

detritus• 5 years ago

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.

wefarrell2• 5 years ago

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?

jnurmine• 5 years ago

For some reason I wasn't aware that ABP supported "Acceptable Ads".

How does Eyeo make money?

happybuy2• 5 years ago

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).

vrc2• 5 years ago

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.

happybuy2• 5 years ago

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.

haasted• 5 years ago

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.

WA• 5 years ago

If you can read German, the blogger Sascha Pallenberg wrote an in-depth piece in 2013 about the scammy nature of eyeo:

https://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke...

dtx1• 5 years ago

For non germans: The Hamburg Courts are known for their usually insane anti-free internet interpretations of law. The fact that this was won by "the good guys" in Hamburg of all cases is remarkable.

Springer Press, perhaps best described as the german equivalent of fox news, chose hamburg specifically for their lawsuit assuming the judges there would follow their usual retarded interpretation of the law. To have your arguments be bad and stupid enough to lose there is astounding.

khuey• 5 years ago

Ah, so the "Eastern District of Texas" of Germany then. Good context to have, thanks.

wand3r• 5 years ago

Yes I have heard of them, only through HN. It is like the US Western district of Texas but in Germany right?

masklinn• 5 years ago

TIL, I was going to say "eastern not western" but apparently after eastern got kneecapped by Heartland western rose to prominence because one of its judges is a turd, great.

IAmEveryone• 5 years ago

It’s a local copy of England retained for emergencies: The people of Hamburg are seafaring, somewhat arrogant (but not without cause), used to bad weather, proud of the Beatles, envious of Berlin, and really wrong about libel law.

friendlydog• 5 years ago

How is this different from VidAngel on premise? Remixing content, html or video seems the same to me.

umvi• 5 years ago

How is this different from VidAngel

Because Disney got involved with VidAngel, and Disney always wins.

The problem is that there's basically no way to stream arbitrary video content you own in a way that VidAngel can access it client side for filtering. This is because the content owners make deals such that the content is only able to legally be streamed by certain vendors (Netflix, Amazon, or other) and those vendors can put it in their ToS that you aren't allowed to modify the stream in any way, etc. VidAngel tried to get around it by streaming ripped DVDs and got nailed by Disney. They might have been able to last longer had they not gotten greedy with the dubious "sellback" program that allowed you to remotely buy a DVD and then remotely sell it back after viewing it.

The only way I see viable "Family Home Movie Act" style video filtering is if you build an open source DB of video metadata and use that in conjunction with a VLC plugin or something. Then you are responsible for obtaining your own video content, which you can edit on the fly with the VLC plugin + open source metadata DB.

josefx3• 5 years ago

From what I could find Axel Springer failed on multiple fronts. For one the court found that the final page layout was the result of various highly automated and industrialized processes and failed to meet the standard for a unified creative work. The court also found that the changes to the pages rendering code did not modify its substance, with that the court distinguished it from a precedent about cheat software feeding false data back to a server.

[1]https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landgericht-hamburg-uebe...

ydlr• 5 years ago

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.

tgtweak2• 5 years ago

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.

rsstack• 5 years ago

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.

elsjaako5• 5 years ago

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?

ajayyy3• 5 years ago

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.

amalcon• 5 years ago

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.

SahAssar3• 5 years ago

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.

Source: https://middle-earth.xenite.org/why-are-some-people-sued-ove...

jerf2• 5 years ago

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.

wvenable6• 5 years ago

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.

umanwizard4• 5 years ago

I could even sell my modified copy.

Could you? I don’t find that at all obvious.

ivanche• 5 years ago

Why not? You've never sold one of your used books?

adhesive_wombat3• 5 years ago

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.

sabas1232• 5 years ago

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.

Dylan168072• 5 years ago

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.

tylorr• 5 years ago

What about if I bought a book from a bookstore then I wrote in the margins or highlighted some text and then sold it to used bookstore?

bell-cot• 5 years ago

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.

Plasmoid• 5 years ago

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.

svnpenn• 5 years ago

I am nog allowed tot say

elsjaako5• 5 years ago

Turns out I'm wrong, at least in Germany and France.

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...

jhgb3• 5 years ago

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.

contravariant• 5 years ago

Well that's a bloody stupid idea.

sabageti• 5 years ago

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.”

banana_giraffe• 5 years ago

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.

rpdillon3• 5 years ago

I was wondering how Eyeo prevailed, given the "no derivative works" aspect of copyright law. They mention an interesting distinction I've never run across before in copyright:

The final 2021 Hamburg court decision, as successfully defended by eyeo, establishes that there is a limit to copyright after which the website author can no longer assert any right of retention. This limit boundary exists between the code provision level and the code execution level.

The article doesn't go into much detail beyond this, sadly.

It's a bit odd to me that they focus so much on HTML. Presumably they would apply similar logic to JavaScript and CSS, but they didn't mention them.

sbx320• 5 years ago

Yeah, the linked article is very shallow. Heise [0] goes a bit more into detail, sadly the actual ruling isn't available yet.

Quick Summary from the Heise article: Axel Springer tried to claim that the website itself is a copyrighted work and therefore an adblocker would not be allowed to modify it. However the court decided:

1) Removing elements (ads) from being displayed does not modify the originally transferred HTML, but only the data structures as generated by the browser, which is allowed to be modified by the user. Otherwise using a browser without images would also be in breach of copyright.

2) The website in itself is not a copyrighted work, as there's no original creative effort involved in generating the HTML.

[0] (in German) https://www.heise.de/news/Landgericht-Hamburg-Adblocker-vers...

mminer2373• 5 years ago

I don't know German law, but "no derivative works" generally only applies to things you reproduce yourself. If you download a webpage, it's not copyright infringement to hit F12 and edit a paragraph. You're not distributing a derivative copy. You're just modifying the reproduction you were implicitly licensed by the web server delivering it to you. If editing the HTML on your own machine was illegal reproduction, just viewing it would be too. (And in American law, if something is publicly viewable, they can't condition your license to additional terms you aren't required to agree to first. See hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp.: https://matthewminer.name/law/briefs/Miscellaneous/hiQ+Labs+....)

rpdillon3• 5 years ago

This is probably not the right thread for this, but I'm very interested in "modify without distribution" that you mention:

it's not copyright infringement to hit F12 and edit a paragraph. You're not distributing a derivative copy. You're just modifying the reproduction you were implicitly licensed by the web server delivering it to you.

In particular, my understanding (IANAL) is that modifying a copyrighted work, _even without distribution_, is still an infringement. At least, that's the way the Copyright Alliance frames it[0]. I think this has no practical effect because it's unenforceable (how can you detect the derivative work if it wasn't distributed?) But it does open the door to the related question: what if I distribute a program that modifies copyrighted works for others?

This case tested that in Germany, but it seems to be far-from-straightforward based on my 5 minutes of searching around about it. Most copyright sites don't deal with this case at all (copyright.gov, harvard.edu, etc.) but I did find a related question[1] on Quora that seems to have thoughtful answers, but it's hard for me to read through them and feel like I really understand the risks.

[0] https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-rights-copyright-own... [1]: https://www.quora.com/Is-distributing-a-file-that-modifies-a...

onli• 5 years ago

The site you look at is a product of the browser after it interpreted the HTML. While the HTML may be protected by copyright, whatever the browser makes of it is not touched by said author copyright. The browser is free to manipulate it however it wants, and therefore the user is as well. This includes the free use of adblockers. JS just does not matter here as it also only manipulates HTML, CSS is just important for styling the HTML.

That would be my guess without having read the decision.

Also, no derivative work because there is no work that is published. You are always free to modify copyright protected work, publishing it is the problem. It seems like this would have been a second hurdle for Springer, but they got stopped before this important fact even came up.

Utter defeat for the evil ones.

tut-urut-utut• 5 years ago

German law, the same as other continental law systems, doesn't know anything about precedents, which are specific to Anglo-Saxon law systems.

G3rn0ti• 5 years ago

Of course, German justice system knows precedents in civil law. Usually, courts respect higher courts‘ decisions. So once there is a „Leiturteil“ i.e. a decisive court ruling, you stand no chance when you sue sb based on your personal interpretation of the law before whatever court you file your case.

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

German law,

Could be.

the same as other continental law systems, doesn't know anything about precedents,

That's a rather strong and wide ranging claim that seems eadily refuted.

The doctrine of precedent exists in Norwegian law, see https://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/39-14.pdf

Or were you being ultra-traditional and treating Scandinavia as separate from Europe?

anthk• 5 years ago

effectively making it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance.

How about using Edbrowse or Lynx?

wasmitnetzen• 5 years ago

Yeah, if Springer would have won, it could very well have meant that running a anything from Lynx to a screenreader or even a broken (or old) CSS parser would have been illegal. Ridiculous premise.

freemint3• 5 years ago

Just so everyone aware there are two Springer media companies. One does scientific publishing and one does not. They are unrelated.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

This is an excessively strong claim, one was started by the grandson of the founder of the other.

freemint3• 5 years ago

I am not aware of any ownership relations, overlap of board members or them interacting in a comparative manner. I am not aware that any in of the two companies the name giving family plays a significant role in day to day operations.

cf141q5325• 5 years ago

Its a claim publicly made by the older Springer Verlag. They ran advertisements in the 60s titling "Springer ist nicht Springer".

Springer isnt Springer. Every chessgame has two knights (Springer) which are easy to mix up. In publishing there are also two Springer, who dont share anything but the word Springer, but are often mixed up as a result.
... Between the two publishers no family or economic ties exist.

edit: Obviously in the context of the Springer blockade by the student movement. The advertisement in question is from the Konkret issue number 6 of 1968 page 35 Bad translation obviously.

nness• 5 years ago

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.

Mesopropithecus• 5 years ago

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.

wvenable6• 5 years ago

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.

jeremyjh• 5 years ago

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.

_fat_santa• 5 years ago

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.

thomasahle• 5 years ago

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?

thomascgalvin• 5 years ago

[The ad-blocker is] modifying the HTML of another author and then displaying it to the browser user

But ... that's what the browser itself does. We aren't shown raw HTML, we're shown a user-friendly rendering of that HTML.

jhgb3• 5 years ago

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?

maccolgan• 5 years ago

That'd mean that automated Photoshop filters would also be this same category, so would Snapchat, that doesn't make sense...

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

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.)

guelo• 5 years ago

You can make a derivative work as much as you want to, you just can't redistribute it.

nprateem• 5 years ago

It's absolutely an expression of creative work just like a book, or software, or music.

Bollocks. It's a data markup language.

nikanj• 5 years ago

So are musical notes

nmstoker• 5 years ago

How about the screws and bolts on an original piece of furniture? Are they excluded from the creative work because they're some sort of standard item?

josefx3• 5 years ago

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.

<html> . Take that internet I own you now.

wvenable6• 5 years ago

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.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

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.

shdon• 5 years ago

Completely unrelated to the content of the article, but I find this website very annoying to read as it changes the scrolling behaviour adding some inertia. It takes a fraction of a second to stop scrolling after I've stopped moving the mousewheel. This makes me continually overshoot and having to compensate by scrolling back a few lines because the part I wanted to read is no longer in the viewport. When will web developers learn not to mess with the default browser behaviour?

As for the actual content of the article, I'm happy that the court recognised the technical reality of the case.

Sohcahtoa82• 5 years ago

Websites changing scrolling behavior is so infuriating to me that I've considered doing my own Firefox builds that remove the JavaScript functions for changing the scroll position.

I can't for the life of me figure out why web devs think they need to re-implement smooth scrolling. Web browsers already do it out of the box, and trying to re-implement it never works in all browsers.

kkjjkgjjgg2• 5 years ago

The explanation doesn't make sense. Of course the HTML code of a web site should be copyrighted.

The issue is whether this implies it should be consumed in a certain way (ie rendered by a certain browser), which obviously should be a no. And the other issue is whether a plugin or "browser" that modifies it (in the client) should be considered to be publishing a modified version. That should obviously also be a no.

From the article it is not clear if any of those concerns have even been addressed properly.

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

It wasn't obvious from the title but this is about ad blocking being ruled a non-infringement. See also:

https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy...

which made it near the top of Reddit r/news.

tgtweak2• 5 years ago

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.

btown• 5 years ago

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.

cestith2• 5 years ago

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.

userbinator• 5 years ago

This is a good decision because the alternative could lead to absurdities like "is it legal to change the channel, turn away, or even close your eyes if an advert appears on TV?"

MailNerd• 5 years ago

The decision can still be challenged and could conceivably be overturned.

choeger• 5 years ago

That argument was so weird. Imagine having a Bitcoin miner embedded into the page. According to this argument I would have been legally required to execute it.

guilhas• 5 years ago

NFTs creeping in

ThinkBeat2• 5 years ago

What if there was a mechanism for signing a webpage?

The browser could be told not to render anything is the signature does not match the content.

This could easily be promoted as a safety feature, you only run the code the web server gives you, not something that has been exposed to a man in the middle attack several times over.

Presumably if they even added a layer of encryption modifying would run into problems with DMCA?

aembleton• 5 years ago

Then I'd just block the piece of code that does the check, or have it return true.

Volker_W2• 5 years ago

What if there was a mechanism for signing a webpage? This could easily be promoted as a safety feature, you only run the code the web server gives you, not something that has been exposed to a man in the middle attack several times over.

This already exists, it is called https. The s in https stands for security, i.e. encryption and signing.

The browser could be told not to render anything is the signature does not match the content.

The problem with this statement is that adblockers are part of "The browser". So the browser/the adblocker coud still choose to render something with no signature. Also, what does "rendering" mean? An adblocker changes what "rendering" means: For example, if the html includes the line <img src="https://www.qries.com/images/banner_logo.png" alt="Qries" width="200" height="90"> then the browser will usually request banner_logo.png and show that here. But the browser could also choose not to do that. If qries.com would be in the blocklist of your adblocker, your browser would choose not to send that request and not to show that image.

ThinkBeat2• 5 years ago

Https is transport integrity.

If you download malware, https ensures that it gets to you in one piece. (or anything else you wish to receive)

What I meant is that once the content has been delivered to the browser, it will not be displayed unless the integrity of the payload is ensured.

A dumb example, because I am not creative tonight.

You download a book, Neuromancer by Gibson. The book is stored in an encrypted zip file.

The zip file is delivered to you via https. You can't read the book unless you know what the key is. If the zip file has been altered post download, it probably will not open even if you know the correct key.

On the web one could argue that if such a mechanism was possible, then it would "protect" people.

Let's say Bob is doing his weekly online banking and crypto investing. Bob isn't that good with computers. Malware is everywhere, maybe someone has been able to sneak an extension into Bobs Chrome browser and it modified the content so he transfers his crypto to the extension authors account.

If the page was unable to be displayed less its integrity was ensured this would save Bob money.

Yes I agree that as the web exist today with an unholy smear of html,css, JavaScript, Pictures, links, cookies etc it would be difficult to do.

But we can go beyond what we have now.

Imagine if someone has slid a nefarious extension into your browser. it can change anything it wants as things sit now.

ngcc_hk• 5 years ago

Not so sure one should trust news of eyeo posted by eyeo.com.

Any other independent source?

Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal precedent for who ‘owns’ HTML

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