It's more that it has been sent back to the lower court. Wherever the outcome, it will eventually go back to the higher one and the decision will be appealed by whoever loses. Nothing is going to be decided for a long time.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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The German high court now suggests that if ad blockers manipulate a site’s structure in ways that violate copyright integrity, they could be deemed illegal.
Now, I'm no legal expert, particularly not in the workings of German copyright law. But an ad blocker does not "manipulate a site's structure", so copyright seems like very shakey grounds for a legal argument. All adblockers do is block connections to specific domains, and then what you see is what the website's server spits out without downloading info from those outside domains. AFAIK there is no adblocker that is editing a website's actual code, but maybe some of the advanced YT adblockers are doing that, idk.
The problem is even if the “structure” is being manipulated, the web site is freely sharing data to your computer. HTML is just data. Code is just data also, there is no reasonable guarantee that random code you hand out on the internet can run on what you hand it to.
I foresee a future where a suit like this holds any ground, and we end up with a DRM'd web and a non-DRM web, and all the blogs and news sites go to the DRM'd portion because they're guaranteed that their ads will show. oh god we're going back to Tor.