Our tiny space on Google's blogspot displays ads, but we love ad blockers. We use one all the time.
Do not look for a contradiction - there is none. To the blogster, an ad blocker is about choice. A couple of dollars a month toward cost of electricity for running the computer is a "nice to have", and we are happy that those users who do not want to see ads have a simple way to block their display.
Unfortunately, the world of ad blocking is not that simple when sites can pay the makers of an ad blocker to let their ads through, or when ad blockers collect and sell data about site visits. Find another ad blocker, use it until its makers do odd things, then repeat.
Recently, some companies have sued the makers of the popular AdBlock Plus in German courts. Germany is a good place if you want to sue people over intellectual property or "over nothing", as the K-Landnews TheEditor calls intangible things, since German law has been notoriously anti-consumer in this area.
German company Axel Springer, publisher of tabloids and mags - not to be confused with the scientific publishing house - has been particularly aggressive in a all things copyright and went after AdBlock maker Eyeo for two things. The first is the pay for play, or whitelisting, where "non intrusive" ads are let through for a share in ad revenue.
The more aggressive part of the lawsuit aims to have adblockers banned altogether. The plaintiffs argue that adblockers are anti-competitive because they nullify their business model. In the best tradition of German media lawsuits, the plaintiffs arguments rest on paper based reasoning with the aim of transferring old business models unchanged into the digital age.
So, in court, the parties argued over digital ads using the paper model. Digital ads, in this framework, are equivalent to flyers that come with a newspaper.
The Adblock folks say, well, our product allows users to basically throw away the flyers without reading them.
Springer et al claim that the "flyers" never reach the customer, hence the correct interpretation would be "delivery of a damaged product".
The dangers of analog thinking are obvious: the adblock folks ignore that flyers are only one way to do print ads, the other being ads embedded on the newpaper pages. The Springer lawyers didn't catch on to this despite the fact that the flagship BILD Zeitung as well as magazines almost exclusively uses embedded ads.
With the lawsuit not going well for Springer, the publisher decided to talk to the techies and to block access to the BILD site if the visiting browser uses an ad blocker.
Which made the blogster extremely happy because it prevents accidental access to the country's most obnoxious "news" site.
Not to be outdone, some users published a method to circumvent the blocker blocking.
Springer returned the favor by threatening anybody who published this information with a copyright infringement lawsuit. Copyright lawyers smiled about that, so we'll see if some court takes Springer's revenge block seriously.
We can talk forever about ads, whether they are evil, how adblockers should or should not behave, but one action on the part of Springer and other German print folks speaks louder than words.
It is the infamous "ancillary copyright", a law by and for the print chumps to squeeze money from search aggregators who list digital news articles with a small snippet of text and link to the publisher's site.
Despite the fact that only small pieces of teaser text are listed and the listings demonstrably drive huge numbers of readers to the websites, the greedtocracy of German publishers wants to have a piece of overall search engine revenues. The news listings don't come with ads, so they don't generate a cent for the search engines.
Who knows, maybe copyright protection will be extended to 200 years or so to make sure BILD boobies and fear mongering are protected for future generations of shareholders.
[Update 10/26/2015] The superior court (Landgericht) in Hamburg, Germany, has granted a preliminary injunction against Eyeo, the maker of AdBlocker Plus. that prohibits the company to distribute "software code" that allows to bypass the blocking feature on the BILD.de web site and to link to any locations that provide such information.
The Internet Law blog asks if this decision really conforms to copyright law and fulfills the criteria needed for a preliminary injunction.
The decision is a great example of German courts almost by reflex invoking copyright violation when a plaintiff files even absurd claims.
No comments:
Post a Comment