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Me and my business partner did get hit by Springer in Germany due to an iOS content blocker. We lost the part that relates to damages and won the one that touch

by seviu 10y ago

Me and my business partner did get hit by Springer in Germany due to an iOS content blocker. We lost the part that relates to damages and won the one that touches copyright. Springer bases its claims on two principles: 1) Ad blockers are damaging their business money-wise. 2) An article and an Ad are an indivisible entity. And from a copyright perspective, removing the Ad means violating the copyright of the article. We lost 1 and won 2. Now we are on the second round. In Hamburg too, which relieves me. Hamburg is tough. If Eyeo won there we have a good chance to win as well. And now Eyeo decided to support us. Things are getting a bit better for our case. Because of that I am truly grateful to them. If it was not from Eyeo Ad blockers would be now banned from Germany. Our case was the typical one that I thought only happens in the movies: Big company crushes small company (and crushed us indeed they did) to build a case against a bigger company than us. From what is worth I am very happy that Eyeo won the case. If they win they will have a legal precedent. And they will go for against all the others. And what about our ad blocker? We had to take it out from the App Store. I wrote an article a few months ago regarding this case would somebody be interested. https://medium.com/@iPhonsoGmbH/ https://medium.com/@iPhonsoGmbH/

ThePhysicist 10y ago
Honestly, win this, then sue them back. This behavior should not be tolerated. The whole ad blocking wars are even more bizarre than the "Leistungsschutzrecht", where publishers tried to force search engines (mostly Google) to pay for the fact that they show content from their websites (and as a result drive traffic to them!), which sounded very similar: Instead of simply telling Google not to index their openly available content (e.g. through robots.txt), they explicitly allowed it, but then tried to dictate how exactly Google should use it in order to maximize their profits. Seriously, if you don't want your content to be freely downloaded, viewed and processed, simply hide it behind a paywall or invent your own proprietary format, and leave the open Internet alone.

by seviu 10y ago

ThePhysicist 10y ago

Honestly, win this, then sue them back. This behavior should not be tolerated. The whole ad blocking wars are even more bizarre than the "Leistungsschutzrecht", where publishers tried to force search engines (mostly Google) to pay for the fact that they show content from their websites (and as a result drive traffic to them!), which sounded very similar: Instead of simply telling Google not to index their openly available content (e.g. through robots.txt), they explicitly allowed it, but then tried to dictate how exactly Google should use it in order to maximize their profits. Seriously, if you don't want your content to be freely downloaded, viewed and processed, simply hide it behind a paywall or invent your own proprietary format, and leave the open Internet alone.