this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
508 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
74193 readers
3916 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I speak German legalese (don't ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.
The way I read it, the higher court simply stated that the Appeals court didn't consider the impact of source code to byte code transformation in their ruling, meaning they had not provided references justifying the fact they had ignored the transformation. Their contention is that there might be protected software in the byte code, and if the ad blocker modified the byte code (either directly or by modifying the source), then that would constitute a modification of code and hence run afoul of copyright protections as derivative work.
Sounds more like, "Appeals court has to do their homework" than "ad blockers illegal."
The ruling is a little painful to read, because as usual the courts are not particularly good at technical issues or controversies, so don't quote me on the exact details. In particular, they use the word Vervielfältigung a lot, which means (mass) copy, which is definitely not happening here. The way it reads, Springer simply made the case that a particular section of the ruling didn't have any reasoning or citations attached and demanded them, which I guess is fair. More billable hours for the lawyers!
[Edit: added "The way I read it, coz I am not 100% sure, as explained later.]
I wouldn't call it fair, this is a clear cut case of copyright law abuse and they shouldn't be able to make dumb stuff up and waste everyones time. This shouldn't even be a case.
The company is also shady: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE
If what manxu said is true it might be both courts agree its clear cut. It sounds more like a pull request getting rejected because of quality issues. "Fix it and resubmit. We don't want this happening again"
I've learned courts have a lot of jargon and procedures that don't make sense on the surface. some things that sound bad actually are for your benefit and it's best to get a lawyer to translate.