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The owners of Adblock Plus have prevailed in a German court yet again. A Munich court ruled that Adblock Plus's "acceptable ads" program was legal:
Adblock Plus has won another legal challenge in Germany against a daily newspaper which claimed its "acceptable ads" policy broke the law. The Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that Adblock Plus's German owner Eyeo GmbH should not be allowed to block ads while also offering a "whitelisting" service to advertisers.
Adblock Plus operates a whitelisting policy, whereby advertisers can apply to have their ads unblocked as long as they adhere to its "acceptable ads" policy, which does not allow the display of ads it deems intrusive. However, big corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have paid AdBlock Plus to allow their ads to pass through its filter software. The outfit said the ruling was its fifth court battle in Germany, this one against the paper.
From The Guardian:
It is the last of a tranche of legal cases brought by German newspaper publishers and broadcasters against the company behind Adblock Plus, Eyeo. Germany's largest newspaper publisher Axel Springer, business title Handelsblatt and broadcaster RTL Interactive are among that have unsuccessfully challenged the legality of the software.
Adblock Plus spokesperson Ben Williams said the ruling showed the court viewed adblocking as a challenge and opportunity rather than a threat. "Look, we don't want to pile on publishers here," he wrote. We know that the transition from print to online is still a huge challenge. But we view adblocking much like the court: as an opportunity, or a challenge, to innovate." However, the ruling is unlikely to mark the end of legal challenges to Eyeo, and the case could go to appeal.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 01 2016, @09:03AM
So if someone offers free beer, it's OK if he adds poison to some of the beers?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 01 2016, @09:29AM
Rather: If someone offers free beer, does it have taste good?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 01 2016, @12:05PM
No, malware is not bad taste. Malware is poison.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 01 2016, @06:50PM
Correct. But did Adblock knowingly let that through?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:09AM
If someone offers free beer ( that he gets from someone else ), and its poison, then is he responsible?
Especially if he was being paid for getting people to drink the beer?
You can't tell the beer is poison until you drink it... neither can you tell if a script is harmless until you run it.
( I loved that beer analogy. Thanks! )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]