23 ms·

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

393 points by rmoriz 5y ago

trizuz 5y ago
vmception 5y 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
- qsort 5y ago
  It wouldn't be the first time that something indefensibly stupid is afforded legal protection, see DRM.
- wolfi1 5y 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
  - mminer237 5y 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.
    - foepys 5y ago
      Yes but there are still significant differences. E.g. Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the "public domain". Everything released as "public domain" today is effectively copyrighted. You can release your work under GPL, MIT, CC0, and so on but not as public domain.
      - freeflight 5y ago
        > Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the "public domain". Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but Germany very much has a legal concept like "public domain", that of Gemeinfreiheit [0] which also includes; "Werke, die vom Schöpfer in die Gemeinfreiheit entlassen wurden." What's the big difference to "public domain" I'm missing here? [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinfreiheit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinfreiheit
        andi999 5y ago
        From your link:"Nach deutschem und österreichischem Recht ist umstritten, ob ein Totalverzicht auf das Urheberrecht zugunsten der Allgemeinheit möglich ist. Die wohl herrschende Meinung schließt dies unter Berufung auf § 29 UrhG-D bzw. § 19 UrhG-Ö aus. Daher gibt es dort keine Gemeinfreiheit durch Rechteverzicht wie in den USA," So the current legal opinion is that you cannot 'give' your work to public domain. Minority opinion believes you can. So for your work to enter public domain, you just have to pass away and wait 70 years (or whatever the specific requirement was).
        ttybird2 5y ago
        https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
        pdonis 5y ago
        Abandoning your copyright to a work does not place it in the public domain. It just makes it abandoned property, which then becomes owned by the first person to take ownership of it (barring further complications in the applicable jurisdictions abandoned property laws, or pre-existing claims by others such as the former owner's heirs or assigns). http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...
  - bitwize 5y 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- Ekaros 5y 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 5y 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.
- cestith 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
blibble 5y 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
- josephcsible 5y 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?
  - blibble 5y ago
    I wonder how many users install an product that claims to be an "ad blocker" so they can see different ads
  - karaterobot 5y 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 5y 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.
    - criddell 5y ago
      That's not the definition though, is it?
      - SahAssar 5y ago
dtx1 5y 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.
- eganist 5y ago
  - sol_invictus 5y ago
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Where should the line be drawn? Are terms like stupid, idiot or moron also unacceptable? All of these words have very similar origins.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      Intuitively, I'm sympathetic, then I backdate your argument by, say, 50 years, and wonder what words I'd find myself defending...
    - eganist 5y ago
      As another commenter stated, there's a good argument against all of these words too. More on the regulatory and medical usage 'moron' once had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology) Pejoration is common; it's just something we have to continue to stay ahead of as people negatively adapt language to suit their own short term ends.
      - noptd 5y ago
friendlydog 5y ago
How is this different from VidAngel on premise? Remixing content, html or video seems the same to me.
- umvi 5y 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.
- josefx 5y 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-ueber-adblock-plus-springer-verlag-verliert-erneut-a-5e058ee7-e0fa-4f0e-aa10-d95d9cfad654 https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landgericht-hamburg-uebe...
ydlr 5y 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.
- rsstack 5y 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.
- tgtweak 5y 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.
elsjaako 5y 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?
- ajayyy 5y 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 5y 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.
  - SahAssar 5y 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-over-hobbit-while-others-are-not/ https://middle-earth.xenite.org/why-are-some-people-sued-ove...
durnygbur 5y ago
rpdillon 5y 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 5y 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-verstossen-nicht-gegen-das-Urheberrecht-6330258.html https://www.heise.de/news/Landgericht-Hamburg-Adblocker-vers...
- mminer237 5y 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+v.+LinkedIn+Corp https://matthewminer.name/law/briefs/Miscellaneous/hiQ+Labs+....)
tut-urut-utut 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 https://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/39-14.pdf Or were you being ultra-traditional and treating Scandinavia as separate from Europe?
deleted 5y ago
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anthk 5y ago
> effectively making it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance. How about using Edbrowse or Lynx?
- wasmitnetzen 5y 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.
freemint 5y ago
Just so everyone aware there are two Springer media companies. One does scientific publishing and one does not. They are unrelated.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  This is an excessively strong claim, one was started by the grandson of the founder of the other.
  - freemint 5y 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 5y 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.
    - freemint 5y ago
      https://projecteuclid.org/JournalArticle/PreviewFirstPage?urlid=cmp%2F1104116235 https://projecteuclid.org/JournalArticle/PreviewFirstPage?ur... hier is the same advertisment made in print. It also disavowals any family relations. "Zwischenden beiden Verlagen gibt es keine verwandtschaftliche Verbindungen."
nness 5y 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 5y 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.
wvenable 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      This puts services like Pocket or Instapaper under doubt. While in a browser the "reader mode" or an and blocker may reformat content and remove ads, etc, it's done strictly for the browser's user, the modified version is not distributed. But e.g. Pocket allows to share a "pocketed" article with all the ads and most formatting removed; they even advertise some articles on their homepage. This may count as distribution of a derived work. They of course give the credits and a link to the original, but I wonder if some publishers might be unhappy enough to challenge this.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > You haven't caused any copyright infringement because you're not redistributing your book that has the white-out on it. Even if you did… since when has distributing a used book with extra notes, highlighting, or even white-out in place been considered copyright infringement? You're selling an existing, authorized copy—even if it was later modified—not making a new one.
shdon 5y 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 5y 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.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y 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 5y 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-copyright-infringement-court-rules-220118/ https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy... which made it near the top of Reddit r/news.
tgtweak 5y 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 5y 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
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cestith 5y 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.
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userbinator 5y 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 5y ago
The decision can still be challenged and could conceivably be overturned.
choeger 5y 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 5y ago
  NFTs creeping in
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ThinkBeat 5y 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 5y ago
  Then I'd just block the piece of code that does the check, or have it return true.
- Volker_W 5y 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 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.
  - ThinkBeat 5y 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. T
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Not so sure one should trust news of eyeo posted by eyeo.com. Any other independent source?

393 points by rmoriz 5y 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

qsort 5y ago
It wouldn't be the first time that something indefensibly stupid is afforded legal protection, see DRM.
wolfi1 5y 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
- mminer237 5y 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.
  - foepys 5y ago
    Yes but there are still significant differences. E.g. Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the "public domain". Everything released as "public domain" today is effectively copyrighted. You can release your work under GPL, MIT, CC0, and so on but not as public domain.
    - freeflight 5y ago
      > Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the "public domain". Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but Germany very much has a legal concept like "public domain", that of Gemeinfreiheit [0] which also includes; "Werke, die vom Schöpfer in die Gemeinfreiheit entlassen wurden." What's the big difference to "public domain" I'm missing here? [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinfreiheit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinfreiheit
      - andi999 5y ago
        From your link:"Nach deutschem und österreichischem Recht ist umstritten, ob ein Totalverzicht auf das Urheberrecht zugunsten der Allgemeinheit möglich ist. Die wohl herrschende Meinung schließt dies unter Berufung auf § 29 UrhG-D bzw. § 19 UrhG-Ö aus. Daher gibt es dort keine Gemeinfreiheit durch Rechteverzicht wie in den USA," So the current legal opinion is that you cannot 'give' your work to public domain. Minority opinion believes you can. So for your work to enter public domain, you just have to pass away and wait 70 years (or whatever the specific requirement was).
        ttybird2 5y ago
        https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
        pdonis 5y ago
        Abandoning your copyright to a work does not place it in the public domain. It just makes it abandoned property, which then becomes owned by the first person to take ownership of it (barring further complications in the applicable jurisdictions abandoned property laws, or pre-existing claims by others such as the former owner's heirs or assigns). http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...
- bitwize 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
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Ekaros 5y 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 5y 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.
cestith 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

blibble 5y 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

josephcsible 5y 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?
- blibble 5y ago
  I wonder how many users install an product that claims to be an "ad blocker" so they can see different ads
- karaterobot 5y 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 5y 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.
  - criddell 5y ago
    That's not the definition though, is it?
    - SahAssar 5y ago

dtx1 5y 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.

eganist 5y ago
- sol_invictus 5y ago
- rosndo 5y ago
  Where should the line be drawn? Are terms like stupid, idiot or moron also unacceptable? All of these words have very similar origins.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Intuitively, I'm sympathetic, then I backdate your argument by, say, 50 years, and wonder what words I'd find myself defending...
  - eganist 5y ago
    As another commenter stated, there's a good argument against all of these words too. More on the regulatory and medical usage 'moron' once had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology) Pejoration is common; it's just something we have to continue to stay ahead of as people negatively adapt language to suit their own short term ends.
    - noptd 5y ago

friendlydog 5y ago

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

umvi 5y 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.
josefx 5y 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-ueber-adblock-plus-springer-verlag-verliert-erneut-a-5e058ee7-e0fa-4f0e-aa10-d95d9cfad654 https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landgericht-hamburg-uebe...

ydlr 5y 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.

rsstack 5y 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.
tgtweak 5y 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.

elsjaako 5y 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?

ajayyy 5y 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 5y 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.
- SahAssar 5y 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-over-hobbit-while-others-are-not/ https://middle-earth.xenite.org/why-are-some-people-sued-ove...

durnygbur 5y ago

rpdillon 5y 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 5y 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-verstossen-nicht-gegen-das-Urheberrecht-6330258.html https://www.heise.de/news/Landgericht-Hamburg-Adblocker-vers...
mminer237 5y 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+v.+LinkedIn+Corp https://matthewminer.name/law/briefs/Miscellaneous/hiQ+Labs+....)

tut-urut-utut 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 https://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/39-14.pdf Or were you being ultra-traditional and treating Scandinavia as separate from Europe?

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anthk 5y ago

> effectively making it illegal for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page appearance. How about using Edbrowse or Lynx?

wasmitnetzen 5y 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.

freemint 5y ago

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

pessimizer 5y ago
This is an excessively strong claim, one was started by the grandson of the founder of the other.
- freemint 5y 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 5y 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.
  - freemint 5y ago
    https://projecteuclid.org/JournalArticle/PreviewFirstPage?urlid=cmp%2F1104116235 https://projecteuclid.org/JournalArticle/PreviewFirstPage?ur... hier is the same advertisment made in print. It also disavowals any family relations. "Zwischenden beiden Verlagen gibt es keine verwandtschaftliche Verbindungen."

nness 5y 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 5y 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.

wvenable 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    This puts services like Pocket or Instapaper under doubt. While in a browser the "reader mode" or an and blocker may reformat content and remove ads, etc, it's done strictly for the browser's user, the modified version is not distributed. But e.g. Pocket allows to share a "pocketed" article with all the ads and most formatting removed; they even advertise some articles on their homepage. This may count as distribution of a derived work. They of course give the credits and a link to the original, but I wonder if some publishers might be unhappy enough to challenge this.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > You haven't caused any copyright infringement because you're not redistributing your book that has the white-out on it. Even if you did… since when has distributing a used book with extra notes, highlighting, or even white-out in place been considered copyright infringement? You're selling an existing, authorized copy—even if it was later modified—not making a new one.

shdon 5y 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 5y 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.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y 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 5y 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-copyright-infringement-court-rules-220118/ https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy... which made it near the top of Reddit r/news.

tgtweak 5y 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 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
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cestith 5y 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.

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userbinator 5y 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 5y ago

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

choeger 5y 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 5y ago
NFTs creeping in

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ThinkBeat 5y 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 5y ago
Then I'd just block the piece of code that does the check, or have it return true.
Volker_W 5y 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 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.
- ThinkBeat 5y 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. T

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Not so sure one should trust news of eyeo posted by eyeo.com. Any other independent source?