A recent ruling from Germany's Federal Supreme Court (BGH) has revived a legal battle over whether browser-based ad blockers infringe copyright, raising fears about a potential ban of the tools in the country.
The case stems from online media company Axel Springer's lawsuit against Eyeo - the maker of the popular Adblock Plus browser extension.
Axel Springer says that ad blockers threaten its revenue generation model and frames website execution inside web browsers as a copyright violation.
This is grounded in the assertion that a website's HTML/CSS is a protected computer program that an ad blocker intervenes in the in-memory execution structures (DOM, CSSOM, rendering tree), this constituting unlawful reproduction and modification.
Previously, this claim was rejected by a lower-level court in Hamburg, but a new ruling by the BGH found the earlier dismissal flawed and overturned part of the appeal, sending the case back for examination.
Mozilla's Senior IP & Product Counsel, Daniel Nazer, delivered a warning last week, noting that due to the underlying technical background of the legal dispute, the ban could also impact other browser extensions and hinder users' choices.
"There are many reasons, in addition to ad blocking, that users might want their browser or a browser extension to alter a webpage," Nazer says, explaining that some causes could stem from the need "to improve accessibility, to evaluate accessibility, or to protect privacy."
As per BGH's ruling, Springer's argument needs to be re-examined to determine if DOM, CSS, and bytecode count as a protected computer program and whether the ad blocker's modifications are lawful.
"It cannot be excluded that the bytecode, or the code generated from it, is protected as a computer program, and that the ad blocker, through modification or modifying reproduction, infringed the exclusive right thereto," reads BGH's statement (automated translation).
While ad blockers haven't been outlawed, Springer's case has been revived now, and there's a real possibility that things may take a different turn this time.
Mozilla noted that the new proceedings could take up to a couple of years to reach a final conclusion. As the core issue is not settled, there is a future risk of extension developers to be held liable for financial losses.
Mozilla explains that, in the meantime, the situation could cause a chilling effect on browser users' freedom, with browser developers locking down their apps further, and extension developers limiting the functionality of their tools to avoid legal troubles.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 21, @11:53AM (13 children)
World Wide Web is sick. We need a completely new presentation technology. This may be the last drop to cup overflow, to throw out those script-infected html browsers completely.
What about markdown? For the start, there are many decent UTF8 .md viewers for terminals out there, some written in sane languages like Golang, Haskell or Julia. Even Python can do that with ease. Just add an ancient gopher protocol under that, IPv6 support, no client scripting guaranteed and we are done.
Bonus: bandwidth economy. And bring back sftp to masses.
Even the respectful Phrack now recieves submissions for the next edition in UTF8 markdown, in additon to classic ASCII7.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday August 21, @12:26PM (8 children)
I disagree, I think HTML is fine as it is, and you can run it on any protocol you want, even Gopher. Javascript is another matter, but I've given up hope of that going away anytime soon.
The problem here is not technical but societal/legal, if things do go in such a way to declare the "code" being parsed by your computer from a remote service as being forbidden to modify due to copyright, then it doesn't matter whether its HTML over HTTP, plain text over gopher or any other tech, in all cases people could be held liable if they modify it in any way.
If I am understanding correctly, even if I were to pull in text via gopher and then have a local Perl script parse it and modify it (e.g. replace some words ) then I would be held liable for a "copyright violation" as the work was not presented as the provider wanted, just the same as if I created a browser extension that removed elements off a HTML page.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 21, @01:46PM (7 children)
Your legal concerns could be trivially solved in a markdown document by a single one-liner notice: "This document is released to Public Domain."
I am sure all LLMs and some humans could understand.
By All Hells, we can even have a keyword for that, what about 'Copyright:PUBDOM'.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday August 21, @02:32PM (6 children)
I am sure, but my point is that its not the technology that is the problem here. The same "solution" would work for current websites, if people were to licence their stuff like that.
I guess we can argue the main problem here is the desire to control and "monetize" the internet. I guess if this court case ever resolves in favour of preventing the end user from modifying the presentation of data delivered to them (for the entire world, rather than Germany as in this case) then I guess the only option would be to not visit such websites.
Currently due to ad-blockers, tracker-blockers and the ability to modify web pages (e.g. Greasemonkey scripts) a lot of websites that would otherwise be unusable become acceptable for access. If they prevent you from doing such things I guess just not visiting those websites would do wonders because (a) it would spur on alternatives that are not so obnoxious and (b) would hit the website owners in the pocket, as that is what they primarily case about (AFAI can see profit is the main motivation in this lawsuit, i.e. preventing people from blocking ads).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 21, @06:08PM (5 children)
The situation is even crazier in that human use ad blockers and bots ABSOLUTELY do not. The entire point of buying bot traffic is to play chicken with how many impressions and clicks the advertisers will believe before going LOL and claiming fraud and refusing to pay for more ads.
So... making it impossible for humans to view an ad-covered page means they cook the goose that laid the golden egg. Lets say 24% of views are humans with ad blockers and 75% are fraud bots and like 1% are humans without ad blockers. We have a stable situation now where advertisers are paying $x for 10K impressions. OK fine. The problem is if you get rid of ad blockers those sites are essentially unusable traffic will implode to the 1% humans and 99% bots. The traffic stats will drop by 1/4, outgoing traffic will be 99% bot traffic, advertisers will not believe that shite, and will cancel, resulting in precisely $0 income. Whoops.
If 97.5% of the human traffic to a site get pissed off and leave, the sites influence drops to zero and will essentially close down. You can sell ads on wtf.com to a company if everyone knows who wtf.com is and everyone visits wtf.com every day. Even if less than 1 in 25 of the ads are actually delivered and seen by a human, because that site is famous. But when no one goes to wtf.com anymore, no humans anyway, its hard to sell ads on a site that humans don't look at that is essentially 100% bot traffic.
Don't forget this includes political ads, and in the 2024 season most election ads were shown to bots. They're still willing to pay for that (essentially, on paper, it costs $1/1K impressions but we all know IRL that due to ad blocking they're actually paying maybe $100/1K HUMAN EYE impressions, but who cares as long as everyone makes money and feels its a fair trade... like whining about diet coke costing $3 for twelve cans vs $3 for a dozen) The problem is if they piss everyone off and upset the apple cart there might not be any ad sales at all......
Then wait until the "dotcom 3.0" scandal hits and companies start suing and demanding discovery of server logs... "Would you mind explaining to the court why 90% of our advertising impressions were sent to an IP range assigned to a data center in China?" etc.
We're at the stage now where everyone knows its a scam, and everyone knows that everyone knows its a scam, but legacy media types haven't been given permission to simultaneously admit it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Thursday August 21, @07:19PM (4 children)
The average Internet user doesn't even know what an ad blocker is.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Unixnut on Saturday August 23, @08:40AM (3 children)
Perhaps in the early 00's, but is that really the case nowadays? While not everyone is an expert in computers, general computer literacy is much better nowadays. Not to mention that pretty much everyone has a family member or a friend who helps them set up their computer, and an ad-blocker is always installed.
I've installed ad-blockers on all my family machines, I've installed it on all my friends machines. When I've looked at other peoples machines to provide support I've found they too have ad-blockers installed at some point.
So I think a large proportion of people actually use ad-blockers nowadays, even if they don't know what they are. I remember when a family member wanted MS Windows for something (which I refuse to support) and went out to buy a new laptop. After getting hooked up the first thing he asked me is "Why is the internet so slow and shit on my new computer?". I loaded up the browser and it was chock full of adverts. So I told him it was due to the lack of an ad-blocker, and showed him where to install one from. Things were much better then, and that is now one person more who knows what ad-blockers are, despite being not computer savvy.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by arubaro on Saturday August 23, @11:10AM (2 children)
imho, yes it is still the case. I work in academy, maths department, and even there there are people that do not use ad blockers, they even use youtube from their app and not from their browser. when I told them I see no ads some of them dont believe me....
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday August 23, @07:54PM
Well having academics in the family (and also having worked with them), I'm not sure I'd consider them an "average internet user". They are not even average humans, being some strange set up of being nearly completely clueless in 99% of life, but hyper amazing at some seriously narrow sub-field. Its a serious dedication to the field of study to the detriment of all else, and it is quite a sacrifice they make if you think about it.
And yes, they are the second most clueless internet users out there (after small children), but their egos generally prevent them from seeing that making it tricky to handle (I am pretty sure the uni firewalls and internet filters were more for keeping the faculty from wondering into unsafe places than the students).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Saturday August 23, @10:31PM
I work in an IT department and most don't use an ad blocker.
The ones that don't use some form of AI generated slop also continue to use Google search, where the top screen of results is AI generated slop, the next 2 screens are ads, and then whatever comes up next is I don't how many screens of SEO slop. I can understand why they go straight to AI slop if the only alternative is pages of useless results.
Of course they could use an ad blocker and DDG, but we're a "Microsoft shop", so we're not really employed for our thinking skills.
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Thursday August 21, @12:30PM (2 children)
Markdown is severely limited. You're suggesting ripping the web's presentation capability right down to the bone.
I'd prefer seeing the web going back to pure HTML (no CSS) before I'd want to see it go to Markdown.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday August 21, @01:23PM (1 child)
Those limitations of markdown are quite instrumental. No place to hide shit in off-screen.
And even with pure html, you will be still kept tracked by other parties out there.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Friday August 22, @01:26PM
Yeah, that's what I said. Markdown is crap. It's a minimal medium, and a really poor one at that. HTML, without CSS and Javascript and cookies is a lot less toxic than what we have now, but still retains the ability to present relatively rich media.
Tracking is present for the vast majority of access events, including pure markdown, because they can see the incoming IP — and in the case of a customer for any online transaction, they can see you through your payment details, sign-in, etc. Even Soylent is keeping track of IPs here; it's used to associate Anonymous Coward accesses with registered accounts. Back to CGI would be fine with me (in fact, it still works, and I prefer it, frankly.)
Modern HTML is more toxic than the original, no question, but it's still better off without all the remora technologies that have sucked onto it. And it's way better than markdown. I would not be opposed to going (way) back to earlier versions of HTML, either.
I can't say it matters, anyway — there's too much money in all this mess for it to be made better.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday August 21, @05:37PM
It's not a technical issue in the browser. It's more of a social issue. If you run a script blocker now you see how badly web sites suck. You allow a few 3rd party domains, and then it cascades and if you want full site functionality you end up enabling dozens of them. More often than not, I just turn around and decide the site's not worth the potential security risks.
This happens because most people don't care and will just punch the monkey. Companies can afford to lose my business. Until that changes, the practice will continue.
It happens because "programming is hard, let's go shopping" and a culture of "let's use this framework" has infected web programmers, followed by, "we need to have social media stuff". Even well intentioned things like the cookie warning do it, so now you've got a 3rd party domain that shows you the cookie thing... and it goes on and on.
At least some sites, like my broker sort of understand this and are a little better--I think that one just uses 7 domains or something but seriously, last time I was on the health care market place it had social media domains in the list. Like, dafuq? Why? I'm not tweeting about my health plan or anything health related. You're supposed to be the government. Act like it. I want that site to be bland as fuck and do its job, not cool looking.
Switching to a new stack isn't going to fix this problem. They'll just corrupt the new stack.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday August 21, @11:55AM (4 children)
By that token, viruses and malware - which, unlike HTML/CSS, are real computer programs - are protected too. That means antivirus software, including Windows itself, which block or neuter malware, are illegal in Germany.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 21, @12:28PM
Virtualization software, also all emulators.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday August 21, @01:22PM
Poland had this a year ago or so. Trains manufactured in one of workshops were stopping in a "plain field" between stations, with totally made-up errors on display because this field was near competing company's repair workshop. When analysts reverse-engineered the code of automation controller and exposed all aspects of sabotage in the control system, they got sued for violating the intellectual property. There was a nice presentation in CCC about it.
As a compensation, a few Polish railway companies purchased more booby-trapped trains from this factory :-).
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @02:32AM
I vaguely recall a court case where some malware-extension sued to be allowed to run, claiming that doing otherwise was some sort of infringement. (This was mumblety-mumble years ago, so that's all I remember)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday August 22, @04:01AM
More generally, using this thinking of "threatens our revenue model", criminals could sue to have the police banned for the same reason.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by r1348 on Thursday August 21, @12:08PM (17 children)
That's the most ass-backwards legal argument I've ever heard of.
No, modifying what is executed on MY computer RAM is not copyright infringement, the notion is so ridiculous I'm really questioning the mental health of the judges who reversed the dismissal.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday August 21, @12:51PM (4 children)
Fuck the copyright law, but if can only can get fucked by it, then: unfortunately, no. The licensor gave you a limited license to view the content you asked under certain conditions. It's a take-it-or-leave-it type of contract - if you don't agree with it, you shouldn't access the content (except for the fair-use provisions), thus nothing would get "executed on YOUR computer RAM", not even the displaying of the content.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22, @12:36AM
Maybe we need laws to where website owners and advertising networks can be prosecuted and sued into oblivion for malicious ads. Or we need to decide that current laws apply here, because a lot of this is probably illegal already in many jurisdictions.
Show a sexually explicit ad to a minor? That's some prison time for the website operator and ad network. The ad network is a corporation, thus it has corporate personhood? Fine, make the ad network register as a sex offender. Also add in some massive fines like $1 million per violation.
Oh, you didn't know that a minor could be viewing the screen when your ad played? Too bad. Maybe you should have considered that before agreeing to run sexually explicit ads.
Run an ad with malicious code or that consumes excessive resources? That's another $1 million fine per violation, plus prison time using the same sentences in the CFAA or whatever comparable law exists in other jurisdictions. This is my computer, and I have the right to decide which programs are authorized to run on it.
Websites generally don't force you to click that you agree to their TOS before displaying content. The implicit consent is nonsense. I haven't consented to allow such ads to run on my computer.
There should be some serious penalties for misbehaving or offensive ads.
They fired the first shot. Or have we forgotten the pop-under ads for spy cameras? If they were satisfied with simple banners and contextual advertising, I doubt any of this would have happened. But we got pop-unders, then resource-hogging Flash ads, and there are obnoxious autoplay videos that you need a paid subscription to disable, and things keep getting more intrusive.
Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Perhaps the advertisers should have thought about this before becoming more abusive.
Again, the law in the United States says that my computer is a protected computer, and I get to decide what is authorized to run on my computer. The ad networks need to respect the laws in my jurisdiction. They need to respect my way of life.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by r1348 on Friday August 22, @11:47AM (2 children)
What limited license? Did I sign a contract before opening your crappy website?
You either have the user accept a written license with a legally valid authentication, i.e. a digital signature, or you can cram your EULA where the sun doesn't shine. One-sided contracts are worth less than the paper you print them on.
Also, if you really don't want people to use Adblockers, just paywall all your content. What, nobody wants to pay to read your vapid AI slop? Boo-fucking-hoo.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 22, @12:23PM (1 child)
Is it unfair? Maybe.
Are adhesion contract legal and enforceable [investopedia.com]? In this case you can bet your ass they are.
They'll do with their content as they please. What they are doing may not please you, but the crude reality is that your opinion is irrelevant and inconsequential for them.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by r1348 on Friday August 22, @05:06PM
Literally the first sentence:
For a contract to be treated as an adhesion contract, it must be presented as a "take it or leave it" deal.
When is this contract ever presented to the users? What is the legally valid way they can demonstrate users agreed to it? There's no "I agree" EULA to go through when you open a news site, it just displays its content.
(Score: 5, Touché) by acid andy on Thursday August 21, @01:33PM (6 children)
If you doodle a mustache and a pair of glasses onto a photo in a magazine you purchased, or tear out one of the pages, is that unlawful modification of protected content? Or adjusting the volume and/or EQ of some music you are listening to?
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @06:07PM (5 children)
If this is how they're going to play it, why not just have an overlay on top of the browser entirely that only blocks sections that have ads? That wouldn't modify the ad's memory at all, and I'm not even sure how they'd go about preventing people from doing that as there's no need for such software to even interact directly with the browser. Computers are fast enough to identify that stuff and track it in real time via screen readers already. Of read through the site's code for where those boundaries are? I doubt that the information about where various boundaries are isn't subject to copyright at all.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @02:36AM (4 children)
It's not the visual pollution that's the problem, it's that adcrap wants to take up 90% of the bandwidth I pay for (that's not a guess, there have been tests showing that about 90% of page load now is adcrap, and on my slow connection I can sure see the difference). Not to mention use up my CPU cycles to quite possibly deliver malware to my system. So it has to be blocked, full stop.
If that means I stop viewing infested sites, oh well. Won't be the first.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday August 22, @03:45PM (3 children)
Yes, but blocking the visual and ability to click in a way that can't be detected kills the point of serving the ad.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @04:04PM (2 children)
That it does, but it only annoys the advertiser, while still annoying ME.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday August 23, @02:09AM (1 child)
I don't know that there are options that don't involve annoying the people browsing the web. If there are, the advertisers will find a way to make those options also annoying.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 23, @03:05AM
That's certainly been the case, yep.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Thursday August 21, @02:23PM (2 children)
We need to point out the server side is not modified at all, that it's purely a network setting whether a type of traffic is allowed over someone else's network.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Thursday August 21, @02:27PM (1 child)
Do I, modem owner and network connection purchaseer, get paid to deliver your ad? If not, why should I download it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fliptop on Saturday August 23, @02:54AM
This is what went through my mind. Kind of like car dealerships that put license plate frames w/ their name and website on every vehicle they sell. If you pay me a monthly fee, that frame can stay there. Otherwise, take it off or I'm not buying.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @02:47PM
We'll have to see what happens, but copies that are made of binaries in system RAM don't typically count as copies for the purpose of copyright law. Those ones are ephemeral and are not distributed and the whole point of copyright law used to be about distribution rights, not copies made for personal use that nobody's going to know about.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by corey on Thursday August 21, @09:05PM
I was thinking, wouldn’t this also make the cache illegal? It’s a copy of the HTML and images. What about web proxies?
What about the ability to zoom in to the page (which makes text bigger than the copyright holder intended) is illegal?”. Or changing the colour profile on your PC, modifies the colour presented of the original copyright material? Etc….
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 21, @12:27PM
This could have strange effects when mixed with vision impairment technologies like screen magnifiers.
"That font was not designed to be larger, using a screen magnifier is a copyright violation".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday August 21, @01:00PM (6 children)
We've seen this bullshit before. The media didn't like VCRs because people could skip commercials. They didn't like Tivo and Replay because people could skip commercials. Now they don't like ad blockers because people can skip commercials.
It's almost like most people don't like wasting time watching the same ad for the 40th time.
It was a once in a lifetime experience. Which means I'll never do it again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday August 21, @02:40PM (3 children)
Yet despite decades of people telling them to get lost with their advertising, they still persist. Even with the same trials and arguments (just in different settings "on the home VCR", "on the Tivo", "on the Internet") in one big loop. I suspect they will fail this time just like every other time they tried.
You'd think they would have got the hint by now to try some novel methods of informing us about products we can buy, perhaps some way that people would find acceptable enough to not keep trying to find ways to avoid it.
Case in point with internet ads. I didn't mind the old days of fixed image adverts on the side/top/bottom of websites. They didn't animate, they didn't track me, they didn't jump around and get in the way. Basically they didn't irritate me. I saw them, if there was something I was interested in, I clicked on it, if not I carried on.
They making dancing jumping noisy video adverts that block the content I am trying to read has not done a single thing to make it more likely I will buy their product, in fact quite the opposite. The advertising got so invasive and such an irritant and time sink that people developed ad-blockers, and lots of people use them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @06:16PM
They also didn't delay page loading to get more bids in and they didn't have malware that would load through it. When my parents switched from DSL to fiber, I was shocked at how little performance gain I was seeing when browsing, it turned off that blocking ads fixed the problem as the ads themselves were holding up the pages in order to try to get more bids in. What's the point of paying for lower latency internet, if that time is going to be stolen by psychopathic sales people?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @02:40AM
The problem is ads are not intended to sell product. Their function is so marketing departments can sell ad campaigns to managers.
And of course now mostly so bots can collect bogus pay-per-impression fees, which show up as higher costs for whatever few legit products may be in such an ad.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Saturday August 23, @03:00AM
The shop I work at sells more tires than the next two competitors combined, and we win "people's choice" every year, all w/o any advertising. How? We're honest and focus on the customer having a good experience.
Not sure if that's a novel method though.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 5, Touché) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @02:54PM
If they had their way, we'd be strapped to chairs like Alex in a Clockwork Orange with devices to hold our eyelids open.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @06:12PM
I think that's part of why they sought to get permission to remove the bumpers between the show and the ads, when you got a we'll be right back message ahead of the ads and another one at the end to indicate that programming was starting again, it made it a lot easier to know when to stop and start the recorder.
The thing is that it was always a pain to work that out, but in modern times, there isn't much to be done about it, People can and do release that information and editing software to remove it down to the frame is freely available for when you really don't want ads in things you've recorded off the TV or streams.
As long as home taping is legal, there's not much that can be done to force people to watch ads as you can legally home tape it and have ML work out where the program ends and the ads start. Or just do it yourself the first time, you do it once and it's done forever.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gnuman on Thursday August 21, @03:09PM (6 children)
Enough said ... Their current "journalism" is (from their site)
just wow....
The thing with copyright ... it's about *distribution* of contents. If you have contents already, you can modify it as you wish, and there's no copyright issues. As long as the user is doing the modifications. Take it this way. If you get a book, you can write on it or burn it. Copyright or not. What you cannot do is redistribute derived works, like altering the book and selling it as your own.
So, either the court doesn't understand that the "extension" is CONTROLLED BY THE USER, or they don't know what copyright means, or it's another case of "by it's in a computer!" type of argument.
Remember when ISPs were going to be inserting ads into random sites via MITM inspection? This actually spawned HTTPS everywhere.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2o7dtk/my_isp_is_injecting_ads_into_my_internet_related/ [reddit.com]
Not using an ad-blocker makes large part of internet unusable. Thanks ad companies!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday August 21, @06:20PM (5 children)
That used to be the case, increasingly we're seeing laws being changed to allow the content providers to control the use of the content after it's been "bought." Or refusing to actually sell it in the first place. It shocks me how abusive it can be, I recently bought a TV series on DVD. The entire 7 seasons plus 1 movie was a little over $200 new including shipping, but Amazon wanted $50 a season for the download. And, even if I had bought the DVDs new season by season, it would have been $30ish dollars per season like that. And a lot less if I had bought used.
And now, I own it. As long as my place doesn't burn down, I'll always have the discs and if I really wanted to, I could sell them when I'm done.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday August 21, @09:45PM (4 children)
As I wrote in my journal [soylentnews.org] DVDs are finicky beasts and will become unusable simply by passing time [soylentnews.org] so I suggest your rip those suckers immediately as a backup and make sure you have a backup of your backup.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday August 22, @02:29AM
I do for convenience, but even after decades, I've only had a couple go bad. But, I rip all of them to ISO and convert them with handbrake to stream with jellyfin. Out works quite a bit better than streaming services.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @02:46AM (2 children)
Better than what Blu-Ray discs can do.
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/08/unbricking-a-bluray-drive/ [hackaday.com]
"Every time [stephen] played or ripped a disc, the software he was using passed a key to the drive. This key was compared to the revocation list present on the drive. When a match was found, the drive bricked itself."
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Friday August 22, @03:49PM (1 child)
That's one of the reasons I have libredrive. It ignores that nonsense. But, I mostly don't bother with Blu-ray for most things due to storage space and all the bad transfers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 22, @04:12PM
Oooh, thanks, I had not heard of LibreDrive. Must look into this.
I don't buy BR if DVD is available, because of that nonsense.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 22, @01:17AM
The fact is that if corporations have their way, ordinary people fundamentally will not have control of the hardware they ostensibly own. The efforts to take it away are constant, and growing, because as far as advertisers and copyright holders are concerned any control that ordinary people might have over that hardware is a threat. And government, being much more in the hands of business than We The People, will be happy to help them gain that control.
That said, I do find it a little rich that Mozilla, funded heavily by an advertising company named Google, is the one saying "Whoops, sorry, we can't have ad blockers anymore".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin