Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal
Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal
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93 comments
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I can't understand this logic.
Assume as stated that a website is a copyrighted and protected. Sure, that means I can't redistribute it to others without permission or a license. But I can't see how me locally, privately modifying the site would be against the law. Should Crayola be sued because their crayons can be used to modify a copyrighted art piece? Is it illegal for me to watch a movie with a blue-light filter on because it modifies how the content is displayed?
Edit: After further thought, a stronger argument would be that it's illegal (in some places) to bypass DRM protections. That's because if I break DRM of some media (say, of a rented DVD) so that I can keep it forever, that would technically be illegal even if I never shared it with anybody else. So if a site tries to break ad blockers but an ad blocker works around that, that would be "breaking" DRM, therefore illegal. But I still find that to be an lacking argument.
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Issue is our government and justical system is stuck in many areas between 1980-1995.
God knows what logic they had for that
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Yeah, but if the indeed come and try to sue you, a competent lawyer will force the case dismissal and they will end up having to review whatever law they pass.
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With the fact that governments are nonstop trying to implement "child protections", I don't realistically see them editing the laws.
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issue with your approach is money , a lawyer , courts and stuff all need TONS of money , not everyone got such money to burn. Here in germany simply asking a lawyer to write something is expensive like seriously expensive.
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Every country has organizations and activist lawyers that help people with governmental and private overreach and power abuse. Is just a matter of finding them out. Germany has a very strong base of professionals that view social benefit as the main reason for their activity, so I'm pretty sure there are plenty of places where one could get help if required.
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I have DRM on my network, I manage my digital rights with an ad blocker. If you try and circumvent my digital right can I sue?
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Using their logic, accessibility tools also violate copyright.
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Applying your own CSS is theft! Verboten!
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I think the logic here is that the code to deliver an ad is protected by copyright and your modification of that code is considered a derivative work that is protected under copyright law.
But that's not what happens at the browser level.
The HTML code is sent, whole cloth, to the browser. The browser inspects the code, you know, to do browser stuff.
During this inspection, the code is put against the ad block rules. Nothing is modified. If the code violates some sort of logic, it doesn't get rendered properly.
Hell, the opposite argument is probably more damning. Say you have this literal HTML:
undefined
<html> <title>I use arch</title> <p> Btw hello World</html>
You could argue the browser is NOT showing your code the way you intended (e.g. "Btw hello World" being rendered though I'm not sure if spaces would be there or not).
At the end of the day, unless you send your webpage as an image, you can't guarantee how the browser will render it.
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You could argue the browser is NOT showing your code the way you intended
I don't think that's a good example because how line breaks are treated is defined in the HTML standard.
A better example might be "reader" mode on mobile browsers? Or that mode in Opera where their servers act as a proxy to compress images and reduce the amount of data required to load the website for slow connections.
Actually the default HTML form and button elements are good one. Chromium and Firefox have different default styles.
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yeah, website code editing is not needed, blocking of resource loading and browser API editing is what is done, and of course attaching additional stylesheets. sometimes HTML "code" editing happens too, but that's probably not that important.
also browsers are called user agents for a reason. they should be an agent of the user, not of website owners, for the purpose of communicating with the website on the behalf of the user
You could argue the browser is NOT showing your code the way you intended (e.g. "Btw hello World" being rendered though I'm not sure if spaces would be there or not).
and that shouldn't be legally required either. for one the web standards were not developed as laws of a government, but there's also software bugs and unspecified behaviors, website owners should never be able to sue browser makers for not showing their website exactly as they expected.
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They are also including the "CSSOM" and "rendering tree" as part of what they consider subject to "unlawful reproduction and modification".
So, according to them, the rendering tree is also part of their IP.. which is bonkers, since it's the browser the one who implements this and even different browsers (or different versions of the same browser) might actually have different rendering strategies, different trees.. different CSS extensions (or omisions/deprecations), etc. You basically would be potentially violating their IP if you used any browser different than what they specifically might have had in mind (which we don't even have a way to know for sure unless they clearly state it...).
It's like a painter suing someone for using glasses and altering the lightwaves coming from their painting..
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You basically would be potentially violating their IP if you used any browser different than what they specifically might have had in mind
also if you update the browser and the update uses new rendering code that does things differently, that would also result in a copyright violation.
simply, these things are intermediate "products" of the web browser, not of the web developer.
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People have confused HTML with PDF for a long time.
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93 comments