German media concern Axel Springer, one of the largest publishers in Europe, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Eyeo, which develops the Adblock Plus ad blocker. According to the plaintiff, the use of blockers not only undermines the sources of funding for digital journalism, but in the long term threatens open access to information on the Internet.
This is the second litigation against Adblock Plus by media group Axel Springer, which lost last year in the regional and supreme courts of Germany, which found that users have the right to block ads, and Adblock Plus may use a business model that involves maintaining a whitelist with acceptable ads. . This time, a different strategy has been chosen, and Axel Springer intends to prove that Adblock Plus infringes copyright by changing the content of the program code on sites to gain access to copyrighted content.
Representatives of Adblock Plus believe that the arguments in the lawsuit about changing the code of sites are on the verge of absurdity, since it is obvious even to non-technical specialists that a plug-in working on the user side cannot change the code on the server side. However, the details of the lawsuit have not yet been made public and it is possible that a change in the program code means bypassing technical measures to access information without the permission of the copyright holder.
Source: opennet.ru