hckrnws

A friend raised what I consider a very valid point, that ad blockers are assistive technology for people with ADHD. They prevent the web from being an unusable mess of shiny distraction. And as such, in America, blocking ad blockers is a violation of the ADA.

I’m being completely serious here and so is he. I can barely use the web without ad blockers. They make it possible for me to participate in online life. Remove them and you largely remove me. An attack on ad blockers is a direct attack on even the slightly neurodivergent, and should be treated as such.

Yeah, that's also the main warning from the blog: the reasoning here is that adjusting how the website code executes on your computer is copyright infringement. The effects of that would go way beyond just adblockers.

I strongly agree with that point, too. The notion that you can legally force me to run a bit of arbitrary code you transmit to me is absolutely bonkers.

> adjusting how the website code executes on your computer is copyright infringement.

I would be interested in how German law works to make this so, IANAL but pretty sure USA copy right law does not work that way. Modification for personal use is normally going to be 100% acceptable under USA copyright law. The DMCA Anti-Circumvention is one exception I know to this but it was and is a big deal for being an exception.

Yes, in the US at least copyright is specifically about reproduction/distribution, not use. This goes to the core of things every HNer encounters like open source licenses vs EULAs for example. A copyright license only governs somebody's ability to legally make copies and reproduce/derive/distribute in turn, not to what use they put it to for themselves. Absent any other contractual agreement they're perfectly free to mark up/modify/cut up a book or painting or the like that they have acquired, and they can sell that specific copy too. But other then the exceptions of Fair Use they can't distribute that work or derivatives without a separate license. Granted, most proprietary software slaps on additional restrictions which sadly have been found legal despite the massive perversion of contract and society it has entailed, but that's not inherent.

One of the things that came out of several Blizzard anticheat/Warden lawsuits back in the day is that, technically, the act of running an executable is copyright infringement, because the data is being copied from disk into memory, into registers and into caches.

Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.

If I own a book I can make as many personal copies of the book I want as long as I keep those copies personal. So it seems like there is more too this ruling than copying from disk to memory or it contradicts typical copyright low or maybe the ruling was about DMCA anti-circumvention?

So, running old browsers with no JS support it's illegal too? OTOH, there's even gopher://taz.de in Germany.

While I am a huge fan of ad blockers, and as some one with ADHD I am very sympathetic to the argument, I suspect that your friend is not a lawyer, and/or is not very familiar with the limitations of the ADA.

He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups. What about blind people who pipe the output of a screen through text-to-speech? Or people with epilepsy who can’t use flashy screens? Or someone who needs to enlarge print or change its contrast? There are plenty of medical reasons to need to alter their browser presentations.

IANAL, but the critical thing to know is that the ADA doesn’t mean that every assistive technology is mandated / required. Wheelchair users would benefit from dedicated elevators where their face is not butt-level with strangers in tight spaces; the ADA doesn’t mean not mandate this accommodation.

Is there an alternative technology that allows people to use websites without flashing ads?

screen readers / text based browsers / etc.

I don’t want to use a “separate but equal” Internet. Screen readers support very specific situations that don’t apply to me. I see using them as the equivalent of tweaking my knee and having to sit in a wheelchair so that I can just use wheelchair accommodations and call it a day. Nah. I don’t want to use a wheelchair or a screen reader because those devices weren’t made for my own needs and don’t suit me.

Text based browsers are largely non functional on modern websites.

>He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups

But what ARE those legal protections? That's the really complicated bit isn't it? ADA does not simply mandate anything anyone could imagine at any price, and there still isn't a huge amount of caselaw when it comes to the web. FWIW in this specific case I think there is some basis, but it doesn't seem clearly established either. The natural starting point is the government ADA site's own guidance [0], and that in turn cites the W3's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as helpful. In turn, that has section 2.3 covering "Seizures and Physical Reactions". But that's specifically about physical effects, does mere distraction count, and at what threshold? Like, it says no more than 3 flashes per second, but if a site ensures it's just blinking once per second, you might still find that distracting but it's not clear there's any case under ADA unless you can point to some other precedent (or establish one yourself). Would offering a pay option that eliminates all ads be a reasonable accommodation or not? Did they make a good enough effort if they pick a major ad network that promises compliance? I don't know, but it doesn't seem cut and dry.

And all of that is about the website owner's responsibilities, not 3rd parties. Like, it doesn't seem clear to me there is any legal requirement for a given web browser to create/maintain APIs for ad blocking under ADA, and any such case would run into complex speech and other considerations particularly in the case of an open source browser (the same challenges also protect from the US government ever trying to ban them).

I think you have a decent moral/political argument which is important, but I guess just realize the legal aspects are complex. And that's before touching on the practical ones.

----

0: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#seizures-and-physical-reaction...

I think the arguments are even stronger in this case. I’m not asking the website owner to make any accommodations to me at all. I’m not asking them to change a single line of code or tweak a single setting. A physical business owner may not own the sidewalk in front of their business while still being legally obligated to maintain it, and I’m not even asking that.

I’m asking that they don’t go out of their way to take expensive and complex technical or legal steps that prevent me from bringing my own accommodations with me, ones that have zero effect on other visitors and cost the owner zero time, effort, and money.

Yes, I’m sure they’d prefer I watched the squares of pixels they sold to 3rd parties. I also bet they’d prefer not to have to pay to install a wheelchair ramp, but they don’t get to make that decision, either.

I agree with this in general, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is current law. Now, I will also say I am not a lawyer, and I can't say for certain its not, but having dealt with ADA claims and done a fair amount of research into it, I know that it is often a very misunderstood law. I believe that fighting to protect assistive technologies at all levels is a worthy fight.

Sounds like images are illegal

You may find this story relevant and helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801718

Actually, the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version¹.

So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software. (IANAL)

¹) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__45b.html

I feel like tools like screentime would fit that description better than adblockers.

How do you figure? If a website takes me 5 minutes to visit with an ad blocker and 10 without, then answer isn’t to timebox that visit to 5 minutes. That just means I only get to accomplish half my goal of visiting it.

Ok, I'll bite... what if an "ad" on a website is a bit of javascript that mines bitcoins using my GPU? Does this mean I have to let it do this?

What if it does it while showing me an ad for something at the same time?

How does running a bit of software on my computer concern anyone other than me?

I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the court's rulings but this seems assinine!

> Ok, I'll bite... what if an "ad" on a website is a bit of javascript that mines bitcoins using my GPU? Does this mean I have to let it do this?

Maybe. The Court has only ruled that the lower instance has to research the topic more, there is no clear answer yet. But it's really notable how incredible wild the judgment is. They are speaking about objectcode and bytecode, and which of them are protected by law or not. F**ing insane. It's not really clear whether they are actually talking about JavaScript, or if someone explained/understood it wrong, or if they probably mean WebAssembly? Is WebAssembly used for ads and handled by Adblockers?

Genuinely, I won't care what the ruling is: my computer, my rules!

:)

Considering we are moving towards a Cyberpunk-esque world, I wouldn't bet too hard on this. Greed finds a way.

> We sincerely hope that Germany does not become the second jurisdiction (after China) to ban ad blockers.

Given the other restrictions on internet use in China, it should have come as no surprise, but I had no idea this was the law of the land there.

Is it? Can we can confirmation?

Mozilla cites what appears to be an auto-translated abstract of a chinese science paper:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

"China takes a different approach to protect the ad-based business model under unfair competition law and bans ad blocking software directly by regulation. The Chinese courts held that providing ad blocking software is anti-competitive under a vague general principle of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law."

In the original blog, "after China" is a link.

I can't judge the legal aspects. But a significant point here is that Adblock Plus allows you do pay them to get preferential treatment for your ads.

I don't know how much this part affects the legal issues here, but for me that is quite a different situation than a pure ad blocker. There is a coercive element here, if your ad blocker is used widely enough and you take money for preferential treatment.

I would be in favor of some kind of vetting program, where you (the ad network) commit to ensuring your (customers') ads aren't scammy, e.g. advertising on software download sites with an ad that looks like a download button. Much like spam, if your ads get reported and they're verified as being in violation, you get taken off the whitelist.

Unfortunately, the main use case I have for 'ad blockers' isn't just blocking visual ads; it's blocking sometimes tens of megabytes of third-party javascript, tracking, analytics, etc., which is not just a huge privacy issue but also slows the page down tremendously.

I remember working at a company which hosted and maintained, for a client, a forum for A-level testing students in the UK, or something of the sort. Over the years, they had insisted on us adding more and more to the site; third-party widgets, trackers, analytics, etc. Each time, we pushed back because of the impact to page loads, which leads to increased bounce rate, lower time-on-site, and so on, but they were the customer and had the final say.

Then, suddenly, Google announced that it was going to start factoring page load times into pages' search ratings and, overnight, the client was frantically asking us how we could improve their page times because they were absolutely atrocious.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a lot of techniques came around to improve page load times while still letting you load your page full of noisy cruft and garbage, so now we have pages that load nice and quick and then, over the next few seconds, ruin themselves with trash that ruins the experience. "Articles" where every paragraph break is punctuated with another ad, pages with pop-up after pop-up asking if you want to join the site, sign up for a newsletter, check out our substack.

This is the sort of reason why people gravitate towards a site's app, I suspect, but that just solves the loading time issue and prevents you from blocking trackers and ads.

Is this a case for steel-manning? We know what this is about and what's at stake.

Sparing you both the reading time and the outrage: No, it is not.

Actual answer from the blog post (tl;dr: maybe):

> The full impact of this latest development is still unclear. The BGH will issue a more detailed written ruling explaining its decision. Meanwhile, the case has now returned to the lower court for additional fact-finding. It could be a couple more years until we have a clear answer. We hope that the courts ultimately reach the same sensible conclusion and allow users to install ad blockers.

Say what you say but EU/Europeans are overregulating everything with UK trying to end privacy. Regulations like USB C on all electronics is nice but these are not.

Who could possibly be in favor of this? Like sure industry lobbying is strong but could any politician really argue they're acting in the interest of their constituents with this?

Traditional news media and print media are really strong in Germany (and for example Spain).

They also made laws happen that limit how Google can link to news sites to prevent Google News from stealing readers.

And they tried to make Google pay each time a user clicks a link that leads to a German news site.

Also there are surcharges on printers (around $50 or so per piece), laptops etc because you might copy copyright-protected texts with it.

And the German online news websites know they lose a lot of money to adblockers so of course they want to ban them.

anti free speech stuff like this is why i only bring burner phones into europe.

That's just Germany. Europe is not a country.

And yet, Dillo, Lynx, Links, and services like gemi://gemi.dev work perfectly fine.

The same with hosts files: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts

Good luck banning Unix config files. My machine, my rules.

There is no politician that does. It's about the interpretation of existing copyright law.

It’s in the interest of the media which is what allows those politicians to stay in power.

It's Germany, certain parties are corrupt on higher levels, to the point of being harmful. They protect the interests of certain industries, even if it means burning down the country. The one suing here is Axel Springer, a well known misinformation-complex, with very strong political connections.

European countries have been pretty consistent that they want to protect their publishers, no matter the downstream consequences. Banning ad blockers wouldn't be very different from e.g. forcing Google to pay link taxes, it's just directed at end users instead of Google. So I'd say a lot of people who want to protect European publishers are probably in favor of this.

Why should I as a user get exposed to garbage that I don't care about in addition to the actual content I'm interested in?

Well, one possible answer is that the content provider only actually provides that content under the condition that I look at the ads. After all, a lot of content providers are businesses and they don't like to give out content for free.

My stance has always been that for 99% of the stuff I consume on the internet, my condition is that I can access it the way I, as the end user / customer, prefer. And if you as the provider insist otherwise, my reaction will almost always be that I won't look at to your garbage ads but instead I'll just go somewhere else for content.

Or just read a book, ad-free [0].

[0] https://archive.is/KHPwt

I’m sympathetic to the idea that someone has to pay if they want to keep the site online. It costs money to create the site’s content, even if the marginal cost to deliver it to a visitor is approximately $0.00. But there’s an astounding amount of laziness in their approach. Seriously, renting rectangles on a site is the only way to get paid by non-paying visitors? Hogwash.

For instance, they could be running affiliate links to online stores. “We reviewed these laptops: click here and we’ll get a commission.” “But that compromises our integrity!”, they might counter. But so does renting out space to advertisers! I genuinely don’t see the honest version as, well, less honest.

There is not much need for a company like the one selling adblock plus to springer etc. I don't see any court going after ublock origin and there is no reason that ublock origin would be threatened by this in any way. However, the actions from google with manifest v3 are a real threat, as well as any obligation to use real name accounts to access services like newspapers or youtube.

0.0.0.0 is a real adblocker. The whole of Germany can fit in there if need be.

Full disclosure: I am German.

[dead]

Ads have been an arms race for awhile now. If ad creators stop making overly intrusive, CPU sucking ads then perhaps people would be less inclined to use ad-blockers.

Even if the ad is 5x5 px, I'd still use an ad blocker because I dont want shitty ad companies knowing every site I visit. I also don't want malware.

This world is becoming a fucking joke, ruled by crooked politicians who have their elections bought for them by corporations and billionaires.

I would hope that people will rise up and take back control since it's our planet not theirs, but everyone seems too fucking stupid and happy just watching marvel movies.

The day I cannot have my ad blocker anymore is the day I'll say goodbye to the world wide web.

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. This is nothing different than "reddit boycott" or "politician x gets elected and I'm out of here"

Sounds nice. But isn't remotely feasible

It absolutely is for me, but I'm probably twice your age and use the internet only leisurely. I don't do social media, I don't use a smart phone, so yeah, I'm certainly an edge case, but no internet would be fine for me easily.

I'm totally with you on this one. And I was an early tech adopter, using a dialup modem (long distance!) to get access to Usenet news.

If a site has ads, and I can't block them, I'm not using that site.

The person I replied to didn't say they'll boycott a website, but rather "world wide web", as in the internet.

If you take a quick look at their activity on HN, you can see they are a prolific submitter/commenter. I find it a bit amusing that someone's whos active than 99% of the people who frequent HN can just simply quit internet (and not an ad-ridden website).

I wonder how AI has survived Germany's seemingly strict copyright law.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...

This is for the whole EU, not just Germany, but there's no reason why Germany couldn't employ further restrictions.

Much like the old "piracy" nonsense, I wonder if banning ad blockers would be a net gain for advertisers (if it was possible). Personally I wouldn't go to a site that had any remotely intrusive advertising, even if I wanted to I get too distracted to read the real content.

Less views means fewer network effects - for a small example, fewer people posting and discussing on sites like HN or reddit. And therefore less pull in of those unfortunate people who don't block ads, and less views overall.

I don't know if it actually works out that way, but I do think forcing people to accept the full bore of your annoying site or not use it at all is a double edged sword.

Does this make curl illegal? Wget?

These gotcha questions are a waste of time. "If I close my eyes whenever I see an ad will I go to jail?"

Obviously the one-click effortless and mainstream availability of adblocking is what they care about, not laborious methods accessible to just a few people with the ability and wherewithal.

If tooling is written around curl for this purpose that becomes accessible and mainstream and popular, yes that tooling would be treated like this.

My question is how do you enforce anything like this? Cookie banners, the accessibility ruling, and now this.

We've had to adhere to the rulings at work; but when I ask the lawyers; "how do you enforce this?" they say as long as you make a best effort you are fine.

Wasted effort.

how do you think any ban works exactly?

When prostitution is banned, do you think they install a cop in every bedroom to make sure there is no money exchange?

When drugs are banned, do you think they put a device in every person that beeps if they ingest drugs and a SWAT team Air drops on their house?

When a harmful business practices are banned, do you think a member of a regulatory body gets to attend or review every meeting and decision in every company to make sure that practice doesn't happen?

When graffiti is banned, do you think a cop joins you when you buy a spray can until you dispose of it?

When vaping on airplanes is banned, do you think they do a cavity search on every passenger to make sure no one is sneaking a juul and puffing into a towel?

When dumping industrial toxic waste into rivers is banned, do you think we install 4k cameras on all rivers to track whats being dumped there?

If this is your first time in a human society, welcome. Unlike math, nothing we do in society is a 100%, but we've been doing it for 10,000 years. You will demand "unenforceable" laws if you like them and scoff at ones you don't like. You already know how and will fit right in.

they may ban particular extensions in regions, it should be doable for majority of public. it wouldn't be a complete ban, they can't really do that, but roadblocks will be enough to deter people

You don't but good luck explaining to the Luddite boomers there

Germany is trying more and more shitty stuff and it wouldn't be far from the government (this one, or the previous one, or the next one) to implement something like this, whether aware of the consequences or not. Lobbyism here is very strong and they try over and over again their tired old lines "fOr ThE cHiLdReN!" and "but, ... but, ... tErRoRiSm!". We can also not trust in our courts to have sufficient expertise or listen to experts, when it comes to these things. We must stop them before they happen.

It is scary to watch, because with Germany's slow bureaucracy, they probably only need to get such a thing through once, and then it would take years of effort of fighting against billions Euros lobbies by the people, because our politicians are so corrupt and bought by them. People would probably have to get to the streets in millions, which is unlikely to happen with "advanced" digital rights topics like ad blocking.

Germany is very much in danger of becoming even worse of a democracy than it is already. I am not quite sure where I read it, but somewhere I recently read that Germany has moved down in democracy ranking to a tainted democracy. Which it is. If politics don't change soon, AfD will get even more votes next time around, and then Europe will have an enemy of Europe in its heart, which as well is the most populous country. Not sure I want to go further into the future of this imagination.

Many countries in the EU or elsewhere, which are still democratic for the most part face similar challenges. I just wish people would finally punish these opportunists and criminals we have in our governments and political parties, by voting for something else. But I guess the average German person is too disconnected and too uninformed and eats it all up every 4 years, instead of voting for progressive parties, to bring some fresh air.

The ruling (in German) is available online.¹

The supreme court actually has rejected most of Axel Springer's² arguments and limited the revision to a single question (AFAICT, IANAL): Are the news websites in question some kind of computer program (protected under Section 8 of the UrhG³). The supreme court argues that the lower court did not sufficiently discuss this question in their ruling.

The supreme court explicitly notes that the lower court should also consider whether Springer actually has the sole rights to the 'computer program'.

Some thoughts:

a) As the supreme court mentioned, Springer might only own (exclusive) copyright to some parts of the computer program. It seems that they embed a lot of other JS code, e.g., Google stuff. This might mean that Springer needs to show that ABP actually modifies Springer's code. If ABP modifies e.g. AdSense code or the code of an open source library that Springer's websites use, Springer's copyright might not be infringed at all.

b) In German copyright law, only works are protected that are created by a human author. (Obviously, the author can also use software to create a protected work.) Given that a lot of JS/CSS code is written by automated rules (or LLMs), rights holders might need to prove that an actual human wrote the code.

c) As posted elsewhere in the thread: the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version⁴. So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software.

(A mentioned above: I am not a lawyer. Copyright law is complicated and interpretations are evolving)

¹)https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...

²) big German media conglomerate, not to be confused with SpringerNature

³) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/BJNR012730965.html#B...

⁴) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__45b.html

If the user is legally obligated to allow the ad on their device then the site owner must be legally accountable for what the ad does, for example if it's malware. No passing this on to the ad-network. Their code, their copyright, their malware distribution.

Surprised to see this downvoted; I hadn’t even thought of it but it actually seems like an eminently reasonable take. The only logical conclusion, even. How could you argue otherwise?

Would love to hear a down voter’s dissent because I’m not seeing it.

It was probably downvoted because it is orthogonal to the issue. The website is (or should be) responsible for malware regardless of whether you are allowed to block it or not.

It's still supporting this hostile paradigm whereby corpos legally dictate the processing your user agent is allowed to do on your personal computer, but grasping at straws trying to bargain for some logically-consistent justice within it. In reality, this type of support will only help the corpos get the basic legal regime they desire, and then if such lesser obligations actually do get imposed as well, they'll just find ways to weasel out of them later.

Will they ban Dillo too?

Under a strict reading of copyright law, this actually makes sense.

The problem is that the fundamental concept of IP is nonsensical and insane. When applied rationally, it will of course result in wacky results like this.

How does it make sense? If I buy a book I'm entitled to rip out pages and black marker words. What's the difference to removing text or images of my choice while viewing a website?

It’s an unauthorized modification (and production of a derivative work) of a copyrighted work.

Which is not illegal for personal usage. You are just not allowed to share it, or even resell it. And even this has special cases.

Which is perfectly legal to make under existing law.

Depends on what the license says in the first page of the book. It may actually disallow you ripping out pages. You don't own the book, you merely paid for a limited license to read it per the instructions provided in the license agreement. Anything else would be immoral.

No, that is not how copyright works, at least not in this country, but probably not in many countries. You buy a book, not a license. Copyright luckily isn't an unlimited right to dictate exactly how a work is used.

Ebooks sadly are different. I only buy DRM-free ebooks that grant me rights similar to what always exists for printed books, but that sadly limits what ebooks I can buy quite significantly.

You cannot coerce me into believing that buying an ebook is any different than buying a physical copy. Either way I’m exchanging money for the right to possess a copy of it. Legal fictions be damned, if I pay for it, I own it, and can do whatever I want with it short of distributing copies of it to others.

It's because they managed to get DRM-circumvention into copyright laws in most countries, so they just have to put some kind of DRM in the ebook and then they can claim that any attempt to use the ebook outside of the official software is DRM-circumvention and therefore illegal, even if you are not necessarily infringing on any copyright per se.

Oh, I understand their arguments. I just wholly reject them as nonsensical. If I buy an ebook, I will happily strip the DRM so that I can read it on the device or app I choose, and I’m morally and ethically fine with that.

I use to rip DVDs so I could watch them on my laptop. Same idea here; same lack of moral conundrum. I wouldn’t share copies of those things outside my household, in the same way that I’ll let my kid read my physical books but I’m not scanning and sharing them on my website. But for my own personal use? Of course. I own those copies.

I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business. I do not exchange money to possess a copy of it, but sometimes I have to wait three days while libgen.li is doing whatever the fuck it's doing (being DDOSed, having Russian FSB datamine the logs, downtime to have all 14 million epubs get their covers replaced with the fuzziest 141x296 cover image that's a bad scan of a worn out paperback printed in the early 1980s, etc).

Copyright is unfortunately like one of the supernatural demons. You draw the little chalk circle on the ground and voice the incantations, and you think you're in control. That it can't leave the circle. But once summoned, this demon does not go away, and it just ignores the circle... it's just a scribble in chalk. Then you run around gibbering forever, crying about how it should've worked, you should've been safe while ignoring that it's a demonic force hellbent on burning down the Library of Alexandria and plunging humanity into a new dark age. Reject copyright. You'll never get it to play nice. They always feel hungry, always trying to take more. Every book on the New York Times Book Review Notable 100 list is available for 4 minutes of your bandwidth. Every Hugo winner, every Pulitzer novel, ever Nobel winner, every trashy little magazine you liked to skim through when you had to go to the grocery store with mama as a kid, all the classics of antiquity, everything. They're right there, waiting for you.

> I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business.

Most people do not agree, in that they think arranging the magnetic fields in your drive to represent and store child pornography should be punishable.

It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.

> Most people do not agree, in that they think arranging the magnetic fields in your drive to represent and store child pornography should be punishable.

I do not do that. Thus, the example is irrelevant. Though it might actually be a good example as to how people use excuses like that to violate others' liberty even when they're not engaged in that particular reprehensible activity. Even before you finished reading that sentence, the little "but you might" thought popped up in your head.

>It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.

I don't dispute that it is proscribed. I simply do not care. When copyright maximalists have to stoop to "what about child pornography" arguments, I think it is more than reasonable that people simply stop listening right at that point. Nothing else they say can or should ever matter.

This is not true - you have received a property right to the copy of the content and can legally alter or destroy it. A license in the book cannot override your property right.

You may encounter issues if you attempt to distribute the altered copy, but that's not at issue here.

You can even cut out parts of the text to re-sell, which is exactly what press clipping services did for newspapers. No copies were made, so no copyright infringement (that simple logic was fine until someone managed to get DRM-circumvention added to copyright laws).

"The first press clipping agency in London was established in 1852 ... Early clipping services employed women to scan periodicals for mentions of specific names or terms. The marked periodicals were then cut out by men and pasted to dated slips. Women would then sort those slips and clippings to be sent to the services' clients".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_monitoring_service

Careful. It's not that simple in the US.

See Mirage Editions v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341 (1988) [1] and Lee v. A.R.T. Co., 125 F.3d 580 (1997) [2].

The first, in the 9th circuit, involved a company whose business was:

> 1) purchasing artwork prints or books including good quality artwork page prints therein; 2) gluing each individual print or page print onto a rectangular sheet of black plastic material exposing a narrow black margin around the print; 3) gluing the black sheet with print onto a major surface of a rectangular white ceramic tile; 4) applying a transparent plastic film over the print, black sheet and ceramic tile surface; and 5) offering the tile with artwork mounted thereon for sale in the retail market.

The appeals court found that this was a copyright infringement.

The second, in the 7th circuit, involved the same defendants who bought an artists' notecards and small lithographs from a retail art store and:

> mounted the works on ceramic tiles (covering the art with transparent epoxy resin in the process) and resold the tiles.

The 7th circuit found that this was not an infringement.

There were some differences in the cases, in particular in the 9th circuit case the defendant was buying art books and cutting out the pictures to mount and sell but in the second case they were buying individual notecards and lithographs to mount and sell.

As far as I know this has never reached the Supreme Court, and neither case has been overturned in its circuit by subsequent cases in that circuit, and so Mirage is still the law in the 9th and Lee still the law in the 7th. In other circuits there have been district court cases that dealt with this issue, but it has not reached their appellate courts.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/856...

[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/125...

No, you absolutely own the book, but you have a licence for the information in it.

Wouldn't the first sale doctrine override such terms in most cases?

Applying this "strict reading" would that mean the majority of chrome extensions are violating copyright. They would not be allowed to modify the DOM to translate web pages, to add price history, check for coupons, etc. as they all modify the original creator's "program"?

If I am given a free magazine with ads in it, I can rip out the ads and just read the articles, or sharpie my own writing in the pages. What makes a website different?

... how would it be enforced?

The same way laws against online piracy are enforced: attack the infrastructure. AdBlock Plus is being attacked right now. If distributing this software is made illegal, all blockers will vanish from the addon stores, and only very tech savvy users will have palatable Internet.

Your comment just made me realize how easy it would actually be for a court to implement such a ban these days: They could simply require Apple to not ship a content blocking API anymore in their jurisdiction. Thanks to Apple's ban of third-party browsers, that would be enough.

On Android, the situation is slightly better, since browsers can be sideloaded, but ad blockers would quickly become a niche phenomenon.

Easy to forget, but some of us still browse the web on laptops and desktop computers where users still have slightly more choice when it comes to what software to use. For now. Of course eventually Google or someone else will manage to spread something like Web Environment Integrity Checks, and then things will become a lot messier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

The mozilla devs were warned that mandatory addon signing and code verification turns them into the main arbiter which extensions may exist and thus a legal target. They insisted that for the sake of security it must be done anyway.

The spirits that I called...

Betteridge's Law, they aren't on the brink of banning ad blockers; German courts are just going to hear the case again. There's no indication they intend to rule differently, only that the original decision needs more information.