Thursday, March 31, 2016

Using Adblock Plus to block ads is legal, rules German court—for the fifth time...

Using Adblock Plus to block ads on websites is legal, a German regional court has ruled. The suit, brought by the company behind the leading German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, is the fifth such case to be decided in favour of the makers of the software, who are based in Germany. The court in Munich also ruled that the "Acceptable Ads initiative," a scheme that requires larger companies to pay for their ads to be whitelisted by Adblock Plus, is acceptable under German law.

As a blog post by Adblock Plus's Ben Williams explains, the court found that there is no contract between publishers and visitors to websites as a result of which users have “agreed” to view all the ads a publisher serves. "To the contrary, said the court, users have the right to block those or any ads, because no such contract exists," Williams writes. "Additionally, the judge ruled that by offering publishers a way to serve ads that ad-blocking users will accept, the Acceptable Ad initiative provides them an avenue to monetise their content, and therefore is favourable, not disadvantageous, to them."

In a significant rebuke to the company behind Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich regional court said that "the law does not exist to save or uphold publishers’ business model(s). Rather, according to the ruling, it is up to them to innovate."

A similar court case was brought last September against Adblock Plus's parent company Eyeo by the German publishing giant Axel Springer, this time in Cologne. According to an earlier post on the Adblock Plus site, the publisher claimed it was "the constitutional right of the press to advertise," and that the Adblock Plus software was infringing on that right. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Ad blockers: How online publishing is fighting back...
  2. AdBlock Plus defeats German publishers in court...

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