A German court breathes new life into lawsuit about banning ad blockers. The ruling could have consequences for browser extensions across Europe.
The German Federal Court (BGH) has revived an old 2015 lawsuit between publisher Axel Springer and Eyeo, the maker of Adblock Plus. The case revolves around whether blocking advertisements in a browser constitutes copyright infringement. Ad blockers could soon be banned in the country.
“Ad Blockers Illegally Modify Websites”
Axel Springer is a German publisher who founded media company Axel Springer SE. That company manages newspapers such as BILD, WELT, and Business Insider. He argues that ad blockers threaten the revenue model of news websites and believes that modifying websites in the browser by hiding advertisements is unacceptable. His main argument is that HTML, CSS, and bytecode would be protected by copyright. Ad blockers would unlawfully modify that code during page loading.
A lower court in Hamburg rejected that position in 2022, but the BGH now rules that the judgment contained errors. The case must be re-examined.
Risk for other Extensions
According to a blog by Mozilla’s lawyer Daniel Nazer, the case could have far-reaching consequences. Not only ad blockers, but also extensions for accessibility or privacy could be compromised. The fear is that browser makers will close off their platforms and developers will be less daring with their tools out of fear. The ruling could take years to materialize. Nazer hopes, in any case, that Germany does not follow in China’s footsteps by banning ad blockers.
Google Chrome also received a lot of criticism for the Chrome extension platform Manifest v3 because it would limit the functionalities of ad blockers. Extensions developed for Manifest v2, such as uBlock Origin, are no longer supported by the browser. Ad blockers in particular are affected because their operation is practically made impossible. However, most developers have already released a new Manifest v3 version of their ad-blocking extension.
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