Axel Springer is fighting the wrong battle at the wrong time

"In particular, the German giant Axel Springer, which has been pursuing a copyright claim through the courts for eleven years. You might assume that copyright exists to protect intellectual property and stop one party from ripping off another's content. Axel Springer's legal team proposes that because this protection also includes the right to stop others from modifying its content, blocking ads running in the content is against the law."

"One in particular detects adverts embedded in a web page and modifies that web page on the fly to remove the elements that make up the advert. Axel Springer contends that because the pages it serves are its copyrighted material, Adblock's modifications are illegal. This contention has gone up the court chain, and has been found without merit until the last appeal."

Axel Springer has pursued a long-running copyright claim arguing that ad-blocking modifications to its web pages violate its rights. Ad-blocking tools detect embedded adverts and alter pages on the fly to remove ad elements. German courts initially rejected Axel Springer’s claim, but a higher court has asked an appeals court to reconsider. Treating consumers as required to accept unaltered content would undermine common protections. Content filtering and transformation enable malware defense, misinformation mitigation, and accessibility improvements while reducing page load, removing intrusive overlays, and supporting user presentation preferences.

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