German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild and Die Welt, has lost a copyright infringement lawsuit against Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus. The publisher claimed that ad blockers interfere with the display of websites in browsers and thereby violate copyright, writes TorrentFreak.

Axel Springer said that the work of Adblock Plus negatively affects its business model. In 2018, the publishing house filed a lawsuit with the German Supreme Court, demanding that Eyeo be recognized as violating competition law.

A year later, the court ruled in favor of the ad blocker developer, after which the publishing house changed its strategy and filed a lawsuit on new grounds, considering the work of Adblock Plus as a copyright infringement. Axel Springer considered that Adblock Plus "changes the programming code of websites, thereby gaining direct access to legally protected offers of publishers."

Eyeo called the accusations absurd, explaining that the blocker on the browser side does not change the site code in any way. Despite this, the publisher continued to demand legal proceedings, stating that this interference constituted copyright infringement. In their lawsuit, Axel Springer cited a 2012 Hamburg court decision that dealt with software for the Sony Playstation Portable console that changed the source code on the device to make it easier to install cheat programs. Then the court ruled that the modification violates copyright and its distribution requires permission from the copyright holders.

At the same time, as noted by Torrent Freak, Axel Springer only stated that Adblock Plus interferes with the display of copyrighted content. This was not enough - the Hamburg court ruled that the publisher had no right to an injunction against the ad blocker. In its decision, the court clarified that the work of Adblock Plus does not provide for unauthorized copying or processing of copyrighted software, as defined in German copyright law.

According to the court, HTML files and other elements are loaded into the main memory of the user's device when accessing web pages that belong to Axel Springer, but this happens with the consent of the publisher. Users have the right to store this data. At the same time, Adblock Plus itself changes the structure of the presentation of websites in the browser, but not the code, so displaying pages without ads using a blocker is not a “recycling” of copyrighted materials, a German court ruled.

Eyeo welcomed the court's decision, noting that the Hamburg court set an important precedent. According to the company, no copyright holder has the right to prevent users from setting their own browser settings. Axel Springer also reported that they intend to appeal the court decision to a higher authority.

bbabo.Net