eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, has scored another victory in its long-running legal battle with German publisher Axel Springer. The Hamburg court rejected the publisher’s appeal, which claimed that ad blockers violate copyright by modifying the website’s HTML code to block ads.
If the court had sided with the publisher, it could have meant that any attempt to change the code of a website, such as by blocking ads or by changing the color scheme of the web page for accessibility purposes, could be considered a copyright violation and result in a cease and desist order from the website’s owner. For reference, HTML powers
95% of the Web.
In its
blog post, eyeo notes that not only extension developers and browsers could have been affected and forced to pay damages, but also regular internet users, many of whom may not even remember installing certain extensions.
