[HN Gopher] Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal prec...
___________________________________________________________________
Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal precedent for who
'owns' HTML
Author : rmoriz
Score : 300 points
Date : 2022-01-18 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eyeo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eyeo.com)
| cestith wrote:
| HTML as served from the server can be owned by the publisher. I'm
| fine with that. Just don't tell me how I can view it and use
| information from it once I have my copy you've allowed me to
| download onto my machine.
|
| What Axel Springer was trying to do is equivalent to telling a
| magazine subscriber they can't cut a couch out of an interior
| design magazine and paste it on a poster board with the wallpaper
| from another magazine to plan their own room. That's not how
| copyright works. My copy is my copy.
| vmception wrote:
| Does this have any equivalent to US laws or was it at all a
| departure from German law? I don't see what the precedent is,
| everything thinks the topic they care about is so important when
| its not.
|
| The claims were 1) that HTML of a page is copyrighted 2) so
| _therefore_ browser extensions that modify it are a problem
|
| If I read this correctly, the court curbstomped 2) because thats
| silly while not needing to address 1) because thats true but has
| nothing to do with what a browser extension does.
|
| Couldn't this had been dismissed since there is nothing new at
| all? was there really ever a risk of anything different
| occurring? what a waste of time
| Ekaros wrote:
| I see that as correct decision. Yes, sure the HTML of a page is
| copyrighted work.
|
| But the 2 following from that is bit weird. I couldn't take
| magazine cut it up and make something new? Or a book? Or maybe
| I have ebook reader and I couldn't change the font and size?
| wolfi1 wrote:
| Germany does not have the notion of copyright like in the
| Anglo-American legal system, so I guess it's basically only
| applicable in Germany and countries where they do have the same
| regulations
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Continental copyright is actually a bit stronger than Anglo-
| American copyright because it draws from the concept of
| authors' rights, the moral right of an author to control how
| their work is exhibited (because the work is tied up with the
| author's reputation). Hence why essential aspects of American
| copyright law, like public domain and fair use, are leas
| developed or missing in non-Anglo Western Europe.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Germany has copyright laws like virtually all countries do,
| and it was party to the Berne Convention.
|
| Its copyright laws are in the _Gesetz uber Urheberrecht und
| verwandte Schutzrechte_. It just doesn 't call them that. The
| main difference I believe is that they're not totally
| transferable and it doesn't have the work for hire doctrine,
| but it gives the author of a work the exclusive right to
| reproduce that work, i.e., the right to copy it and to
| delegate that right.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Not only does Germany have copyright, it is _the_ reason
| why Disney was able to bully around the US into the last
| major copyright term extension.
|
| On a more meta note, I'm noticing a pattern where people
| figure that jurisdictional or cultural differences
| constitute such a dramatic difference that "insert crazy
| copyright law here" is just assumed to not apply in their
| local jurisdiction, or that it will never apply to them. It
| will. There might be cases where you do have cultural
| differences, but copyright isn't one of them. Copyright
| enjoys _deep_ international consensus on almost every
| issue, and the only practical differences between
| jurisdictions are things like:
|
| - Should copyright terms be long (life+50), extra-long
| (life+70), or practically forever (up to life+100)?
|
| - Should authors be allowed to unwind licensing agreements
| and copyright transfers?
|
| - Can an author intentionally destroy their own copyright
| interest in a work? Or does "public domain" only include
| works whose copyright has naturally expired?
|
| - Do authors enjoy moral rights to their work? If so, can
| those rights be waived or not?
|
| - Do online services need to proactively filter content in
| order to avoid copyright liability, or is merely offering
| no-questions-asked takedowns to copyright owners enough?
|
| - Do you need to register your copyright in order to sue?
|
| Y'know, things "on the margins" of copyright.
|
| It's important not to understate how _ridiculously radical_
| the stereotypical hacker position on copyright is. Even
| avowed Communists were willing to continue a watered-down
| copyright regime[0] despite having a legal system that
| specifically considered profit to be a form of exploitation
| and regularly charged people with things like "social
| parasitism". The kinds of people here who would like to see
| copyright abolished or reformed into oblivion are, in one
| sense at least, "to the left[1] of Soviet Russia".
| Everywhere else, people hold copyright as a base
| assumption. This includes "America", "the Anglosphere",
| "the West", and any other division you want to talk about
| to make your point that you don't think the law applies
| when it does.
|
| [0] Strictly speaking, I've been told by actual Russian
| emigrants who lived under Soviet rule that copyright wasn't
| a thing people worried about until the fall of Communism.
| However, this is also concomitant with copyright interests
| in capitalist countries being increasingly worried about
| consumer-level copyright infringement. What I do know is
| that the laws on the books did exist, but I suspect they
| were only used against state-owned publishing enterprises,
| as that would fit in with the general ideas behind
| Socialist law better.
|
| The Soviets _were_ actually worried about the masses
| copying music before the RIAA was. However, this had less
| to do with copyright and more to do with censorship: before
| the 1970s importing western music was hella illegal. There
| actually were bootleg music copying rings at that time;
| they 'd copy the music onto makeshift vinyl records made
| out of old X-ray prints.
|
| [1] Insamuch as "left" without additional qualifiers is
| even a meaningful term at that point.
| foepys wrote:
| Yes but there are still significant differences. E.g.
| Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the
| "public domain". Everything released as "public domain"
| today is effectively copyrighted. You can release your work
| under GPL, MIT, CC0, and so on but not as public domain.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Germany has no legal concept of dedicating work to the
| "public domain"._
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but Germany
| very much has a legal concept like "public domain", that
| of Gemeinfreiheit [0] which also includes;
|
| _" Werke, die vom Schopfer in die Gemeinfreiheit
| entlassen wurden."_
|
| What's the big difference to "public domain" I'm missing
| here?
|
| [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinfreiheit
| andi999 wrote:
| From your link:"Nach deutschem und osterreichischem Recht
| ist umstritten, ob ein Totalverzicht auf das Urheberrecht
| zugunsten der Allgemeinheit moglich ist. Die wohl
| herrschende Meinung schliesst dies unter Berufung auf SS
| 29 UrhG-D bzw. SS 19 UrhG-O aus. Daher gibt es dort keine
| Gemeinfreiheit durch Rechteverzicht wie in den USA,"
|
| So the current legal opinion is that you cannot 'give'
| your work to public domain. Minority opinion believes you
| can.
|
| So for your work to enter public domain, you just have to
| pass away and wait 70 years (or whatever the specific
| requirement was).
| ttybird2 wrote:
| https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
| cestith wrote:
| It looks like Axel Springer was trying to assert that the
| user's own software on their own client device was creating
| derivative works on behalf of companies like eyeo. Just because
| eyeo wrote the software that I may or may not choose to use on
| my device does not mean and IMO should not be taken to mean
| that eyeo is republishing anything for my consumption. I'm just
| using my copy of the web page that I obtained legally from the
| web server with software I choose to use which may display
| things differently from how the publisher of the page intends.
| [deleted]
| qsort wrote:
| It wouldn't be the first time that something indefensibly
| stupid is afforded legal protection, see DRM.
| LordHeini wrote:
| Not sure of anything equivalent, but the whole case does not
| make much sense.
|
| In my opinion its quite simple:
|
| The Landgericht Hamburg is known for its incredible ineptitude
| and a tendency to decide in favor of the likes of Springer and
| other internet/tech adverse entities.
|
| I assume, Springer which a massive publisher of Fox News style
| garbage like Bild (colloquially known as Blod), tried to
| capitalize on that ineptitude.
|
| So it is quite remarkable that Springer failed.
| blibble wrote:
| > developer of best-in-class ad-filtering technology found in
| millions of browsers and products around the world
|
| I must admit, this is pretty funny... there is "ublock" which
| users are tricked into installing (instead of the real ublock
| origin), which uses their "acceptable ads"
|
| and people have said that their business model is based on
| extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads
| josephcsible wrote:
| Is "acceptable ads" really a bad thing? I'm not opposed to
| seeing any ads; I just don't want badly behaved ones. And is
| there a less bad alternative to accomplish that?
| radley wrote:
| "Acceptable" for whom? After AdBlock made their acceptable
| ads deal with Google, they whitelisted stuff like sexy girls
| and misinfo videos in the Recommended Videos side-list on
| YouTube. Fake Ublock is probably the same way.
| qoi24u5xnlqeuq wrote:
| previous employer had a hush-hush-don't-talk-about-it deal
| with ABP. $1mi per month to allow a subset of our ads all
| over the internet. ...which all the tracking cookies
| included.
|
| It was a great deal for everyone, but people who installed
| ABP.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, it's a bad thing.
|
| Because you can't choose what's acceptable, they do.
|
| You won't decide the topic, format, quantity, density,
| duration, nature or interruption type. Which is different for
| you, me, or your children.
|
| What's more, ads are not made for your benefit, ever, but to
| the benefit of the advertiser which may (but statistically
| more likely may not) align with yours.
|
| And also because:
|
| - the incentive gets twisted, which means you can't trust
| ublock on the long run.
|
| - unkown unknowns means down the road, some ads will manage
| to track you or serve malicious content despite ublock
| filtering.
|
| - ads paid content is a terrible business model which take a
| price people are not wired to assess nor realize they pay for
| something they disguise as free yet has an impact on the
| entire society. Not a great thing to encourage.
|
| And I say all that as someone who gets revenue from ads.
| gorhill wrote:
| > you can't trust ublock on the long run
|
| Why is this? Would you also say this for other long running
| open source projects which have never breach the trust of
| their users?
| tpxl wrote:
| Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't uBlock handed over
| (changed owners? don't quite know how to put it) and
| uBlock origin started later precisely because uBlock
| breached the trust of their users?
| gorhill wrote:
| I am assuming the person was referring to "uBlock Origin"
| given that "uBlock" has already shown it can't be
| trusted, maybe I am wrong and he was indeed referring to
| "uBlock".
|
| The repo was handed in good faith, not for the sake of
| financial gains. It turned out to be a mistake, from
| which I learned. That was now nearly seven years ago. If
| the take away from that event after years of never
| breaching user trust is that "uBlock Origin can't be
| trusted in the long run", that's pretty harsh.
| mundo03 wrote:
| Right, any idea on how to keep content accessible and
| people with paychecks maintaining it?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think so. You ask a server for something and it bundles
| that thing with other bits crafted to make you do something
| other than what you originally contacted the server for.
|
| It might exploit a buffer overflow or it might exploit a
| distractable human, but it's malware just the same.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Privacy Badger may be useful to you. It blocks trackers,
| which just so happens to prevent some ads from loading.
|
| I've seen websites ask me to disable my ad blocker when I
| only have Privacy Badger enabled (on top of Firefox's built-
| in behaviour).
| karaterobot wrote:
| For you, this might be a great solution. I think most people
| who install an adblocker do it because they don't want to see
| _any_ ads, so it defeats the purpose.
| blibble wrote:
| I wonder how many users install an product that claims to be
| an "ad blocker" so they can see different ads
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, all advertisers can go to hell. If a
| majority of advertisers had behaved themselves we would never
| have invented ad blockers[0] in the first place. This
| industry has proven time and time again that they are the
| scum of the fucking earth and cannot be trusted. I for one am
| tired of giving them any chances.
|
| [0] pop up blockers, originally
| dheera wrote:
| Yes this. I've had it with ads that pop up filling up the
| screen while I'm reading halfway through a sentence,
| spewing cookies all over the place, and loading megabytes
| of JavaScripts on a 2G connection.
|
| They can all pay the consequences now of me blocking them.
|
| If they had been well-behaved and stuck to inline ads with
| no cookies, I would have left them there.
| mcherm wrote:
| > I'm not opposed to seeing any ads; I just don't want badly
| behaved ones.
|
| While I support this sentiment, a definition of "badly
| behaved ads" which is based on whether or not the advertiser
| paid money to some third party is just not a definition I can
| live with.
| criddell wrote:
| That's not the definition though, is it?
| roblabla wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "definition". They say[0]
| they only accept ads that do not disrupt the reading
| flow, can be distinguished from the rest of the content,
| and has a reasonable size (all clearly defined). (They
| also have more criterias, but those are the main ones).
|
| But the problem is, that is very poorly enforced in
| practice. Whenever I use ABP, I see ads breaking the
| standard _everywhere_. To the point where I can only
| assume the Acceptable Ads definition is just a
| deflection.
|
| And of course, there's the whole "you need to pay to get
| on the list" which creates some very awful incentives.
|
| [0]: https://acceptableads.com/standard/
| SahAssar wrote:
| You have to pay a fee to get on to the acceptable ads
| list, right?
| mundo03 wrote:
| check acceptableads.com In summary, high revenue/traffic
| sites do pay, small sites don't.
| criddell wrote:
| You have to pay tuition to attend MIT but that's not all
| you have to do to leave there with a degree.
| cowpig wrote:
| And did you know that you need to add or remove hydrogen
| ions to change the pH of a solution? Anyway, back to the
| conversation we were having
| JadeNB wrote:
| You can explain why you think it's a bad analogy, but
| this kind of dismissive snark helps no one.
| cowpig wrote:
| I agree in principle but I also feel like there needs to
| be a minimum threshold of effort or topical relevance in
| a comment or the discussion becomes a kind of Gish
| Gallop[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
| Kye wrote:
| How about a Gish Trot? Use flowery language to further
| confuse and it's Gish Dressage.
| pgrote wrote:
| I think that is a legitimate question. The issue becomes
| there is no standard or method to ensure acceptable ads. A
| static ad without javascript is acceptable to me. Maybe not
| to someone else.
|
| But ... the ad industry would never accept a static ad more
| akin to a billboard than a tracking device. Many times in the
| past malware has found its way into networks run by the more
| highly regarded ad systems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
|
| If a content publisher refuses to let people read articles
| without a subscription or with an ad blocker, I am ok with
| that. It is their choice.
| josefx wrote:
| > a static ad more akin to a billboard than a tracking
| device
|
| The sad part is that you assume that modern day billboards
| aren't tracking you. All you need is a camera, a tiny
| computer and some AI. Once walked by a fully electronic
| billboard where the slideshow crashed, the log it displayed
| listed everything it could identify about people passing
| by, age, gender, height, hair color, emotional state, ... .
| atoav wrote:
| Static non javascript file, hosted by the site owner.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > the ad industry would never accept a static ad more akin
| to a billboard than a tracking device.
|
| Is JS synonymous with tracking? Why can't you just track
| server side? I don't see how removing JS from ads would
| prevent FB from targeting me on my FB feed.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Without JS phoning home everywhere there's a 'share on
| Facebook' button, Facebook can only track your activity
| on their site.
| jnurmine wrote:
| For some reason I wasn't aware that ABP supported "Acceptable
| Ads".
|
| How does Eyeo make money?
| detaro wrote:
| Huh? What does eyeo have to do with uBlock? Adblock plus is
| their thing.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| AdBlock Plus and uBlock are owned by the same company, uBlock
| is not uBlock Origin, and the history is confusing.
|
| uBlock/uBlock was the original, released in 2014 by Gorhill.
| In 2015, fed up with support request, he transferred the
| project to Chris Aljoudi. He then forked his own project,
| most likely due to a disagreement over donations, it became
| uBlock Origin. Eventually most people moved from uBlock to
| the better maintained uBlock Origin. Eyeo eventually bought
| uBlock and added their "acceptable ads" option.
|
| So you can't say that uBlock is a fake, it is actually the
| original project. But the one made by the original author is
| uBlock Origin.
|
| Yes it is confusing, but whatever, get uBlock Origin.
| gorhill wrote:
| The current "uBlock" is not the original project, "uBlock
| Origin" is the original project.
|
| The essence of a project is not the location of its repo on
| GitHub, it's who worked on it since it was first created,
| i.e. the commit history. If you look at the commit history
| of "uBlock Origin", it goes back without interruption to
| June 23rd, 2014, back to when I created the repo.[1]
|
| The claim that the current "uBlock" is the "official",
| "original" project is a marketing pitch by the people
| behind it, who I call out as purposefully deceitful.[2]
|
| * * *
|
| [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1477665332156420096
| ajayyy wrote:
| It is officially one "team" now https://eyeo.com/teaming-up-
| for-new-products-the-teams-behin...
|
| Historically, it always seemed like it was one company though
| as Adblock codebase has been based on Adblock plus codebase
| for years, and they both use Acceptable ads.
|
| Edit to avoid confusion: Fake "uBlock" (not to be confused
| with uBlock Origin) is owned by AdBlock
| https://www.ublock.org/blog/an-update-on-ublock/
| efdee wrote:
| That article is about the team(s) behind Adblock and
| Adblock Plus. It has nothing to do with uBlock Origin.
| ajayyy wrote:
| uBlock != uBlock Origin
|
| uBlock is a scam
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock
| https://ublock.org
| xxpor wrote:
| Adblock/ABP != uBlock Origin
| whimsicalism wrote:
| lol ublock origin blocks that second link
| detaro wrote:
| ... and what does that have to do with uBlock? (EDIT: and
| if you edit in answers to questions into your original
| comment, please mark that as an edit)
| erk__ wrote:
| uBlock (Not origin) was acquired by AdBlock (not plus),
| look under the uBlock header here
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock
| detaro wrote:
| thanks, that was the piece that I was missing
| ballenf wrote:
| Feels like a bad time to bite the hand that was willing to
| defend a precedent that serves everyone (if publishers were
| successful there, they'd have a much easier time arguing in
| other countries for "harmonization" legislation).
| Aperocky wrote:
| Precedent or not, they have no ability to enforce any of such
| ridiculous claim had it gone the other way, it's like certain
| governments trying to 'ban' encryption.
| 1f60c wrote:
| Let's hope their lawyers don't read HN. :-)
| gowld wrote:
| It's a good time to think about how to fund legal defense for
| free / open source software, and not rely on alliances with
| scammy companies.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Reminds me of
| https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/business/media-business-a...
| where a bunch of billboard owners in Times Square (New York
| City) tried to sue Sony over digitally replacing the
| advertisements in scenes in a Spiderman Movie. Luckily the
| judge in that case came to a similar conclusion.
|
| I'm still dubious the city skylines can be copyrighted - NYC
| believes they own the copyright on the city's skyline. I'm also
| dubious that the NYC Subway can copyright the route indicators
| (letters in circles).
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-por...
|
| http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-intellectu...
| [deleted]
| detritus wrote:
| I've helped on a few jobs that required representing the
| skyline of London (in advertising, for example) and my
| clients have always been very careful to ensure that modern
| landmarks aren't entirely accurate, to avoid this kind of
| complication.
| wefarrell wrote:
| Going after photographers who have the subway signs in the
| background is one thing, but going after businesses for
| copying their font seems entirely different to me.
|
| They're a corporation who paid a lot of money for the rights
| to it, how is is different than Walmart or Netflix going
| after companies for using their fonts?
| nybble41 wrote:
| The GP's linked article[0] doesn't say anything about
| fonts. It says that the MTA sued someone for using the
| letter 'N' in a circle on a T-shirt. Not even the same
| color scheme.
|
| Judging from the examples on one of the MTA's branding
| pages[1], there doesn't seem to be anything particularly
| unique about the font they're using. They don't even
| mention it by name. Other sources claim the official
| signage is a mix of Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk. In any
| case, fontface designs are not copyrightable in the US.
| _Fonts_ can be (as programs /data) but that isn't really
| relevant here.
|
| [0] http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2010/01/07/mta-symbols-
| intellectu...
|
| [1]
| http://web.mta.info/developers/resources/line_colors.htm
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > and people have said that their business model is based on
| extorting ad companies to pay them to not block their ads
|
| i mean, it is. ABP is basically modern day protection racket
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| In a protection racket, you're paying for protection from the
| protectors, no third party involved.
|
| In this case they're a middle man between the abusers and the
| abused, so I think it's more like prostitution.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| If it is, I like this protection racket.
|
| Inflamatory statements aside, and whether or not online
| advertising is acceptable in its current form, there is a
| need they are fulfilling. If people don't find ads to be
| hospitable to their user experience then people don't find
| ads to be hospitable to their user experience, period. You
| can argue why all you want, in the meantime, ABP is there to
| get rid of them for you.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| No, they are there to get companies to pay them hundreds of
| thousands of $ in order to get them to unblock their
| advertising.
|
| They'll also mistakenly introduce bugs to destroy your on-
| site metrics if you don't pay up.
| simonbw wrote:
| But ABP isn't there to get rid of them for you, they're
| there to get paid for allowing you to see them. Not only
| that, they're trying to weaken the other adblockers that
| _are_ there to get rid of ads for you.
| SomeBoolshit wrote:
| It's crazy that this fundamental misunderstanding still
| gets repeated ever since they introduced acceptable ads.
|
| Companies pay to get their ads categorized as acceptable
| _if they meet the criteria for that_. You can 't just pay
| to get your ads to show up.
|
| And within the browser extension, the user still has the
| option to block them anyway.
| bserge wrote:
| Taywee wrote:
| > Not only that, they're trying to weaken the other
| adblockers that are there to get rid of ads for you.
|
| I'm going to need a citation for that. I don't use ABP
| for obvious reasons, but I don't really see them as a
| problem; they're effectively extorting money from
| advertising companies, which are absolute scum and
| deserve to lose any and all profits that they have made
| (not only for scummy business practices and an entire
| business model built around the worst kind of
| psychological manipulation and data mining, but actually
| convincing people that they are good for supporting a
| "free web" as if they are some charitable benefactors
| giving free money out of the good of their hearts). The
| enemy of my enemy is my friend.
|
| I haven't been able to suss out any way that they do any
| real harm to the end users, but if they do actually do
| harm to other ad blockers, that would be some actual
| harm, but I am having trouble finding any evidence of
| this anywhere.
| salawat wrote:
| So... Why not support the ones that just remove it?
| Because you're implicitly legitimizing advertising
| practices (albeit at a hgher cost) by supporting these
| yokels.
| Taywee wrote:
| I use uBlock Origin. I'm just saying that I see blocking
| ads and strong arming disgusting companies into losing
| some of their ill-gotten profits as not much of a bad
| thing. I don't see any way that ABP existing is worse for
| the end user than it not existing, especially if you
| don't even use it anyway.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you 're implicitly legitimizing advertising practices_
|
| There is a middle ground of people okay with advertising,
| but pissed off about the nightmare that is the present
| state of internet ads. I use uBlock. But I'd be okay with
| _e.g._ text ads that don't track me.
| [deleted]
| dtx1 wrote:
| For non germans: The Hamburg Courts are known for their usually
| insane anti-free internet interpretations of law. The fact that
| this was won by "the good guys" in Hamburg of all cases is
| remarkable.
|
| Springer Press, perhaps best described as the german equivalent
| of fox news, chose hamburg specifically for their lawsuit
| assuming the judges there would follow their usual retarded
| interpretation of the law. To have your arguments be bad and
| stupid enough to lose there is astounding.
| eganist wrote:
| soperj wrote:
| Considering he wasn't actually describing someone with
| intellectual disabilities, and the word shouldn't be used to
| describe someone with a disability now, why can't the word be
| used as "foolish"?
| robbedpeter wrote:
| simonh wrote:
| Personal feelings are not, or should not be protected in
| law. There is no right protecting someone from things
| they personally find offensive.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Be that as it may, it's still useful to be polite. I'm
| given the full right to flip the bird to any person I
| want. That doesn't mean that I should do it to everyone I
| see.
| simonh wrote:
| Sure, and persistently targeting an individual shouldn't
| be acceptable, but that's not what's happening here. I
| know there's a strain of bullying that claims protection
| as "humour" too, but I didn't divine any malign intent in
| the comment.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here.
| Please don't do this again.
|
| Also, bringing in someone's personal details as
| ammunition in an argument is not cool - https://hn.algoli
| a.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| eganist wrote:
| > eganist is a reddit moderator, that's all that needs to
| be said.
|
| Regrettably, we've lost lives on the subreddit in
| question owing to people taking their own lives or being
| murdered as a consequence of threads posted to it. So I
| appreciate the highlight; it's definitely one of the
| reasons I'm so sensitive to it.
| gjs278 wrote:
| sol_invictus wrote:
| dtx1 wrote:
| rosndo wrote:
| Where should the line be drawn? Are terms like stupid, idiot
| or moron also unacceptable? All of these words have very
| similar origins.
| eganist wrote:
| As another commenter stated, there's a good argument
| against all of these words too.
|
| More on the regulatory and medical usage 'moron' once had:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)
|
| Pejoration is common; it's just something we have to
| continue to stay ahead of as people negatively adapt
| language to suit their own short term ends.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| eganist wrote:
| > It is. And always will be, no matter how much or how
| little the "vocabulary police" like you (is that
| acceptable or is that, in your small mind, (incorrectly)
| an ad-hominem too?) decide what language is "acceptable"
| and what is "unacceptable."
|
| > I'll decide for myself (and accept the
| judgement/consequences of my peers -- of whom you are
| not) what is appropriate to say in a particular context.
|
| > I don't need you or anyone else to tell me what words I
| should or shouldn't use. And I'll say what I want, when I
| want. Deal with it -- or don't and just ignore what I
| say, my username is at the top of all my posts.
|
| > Or blather on about why I'm a terrible person because I
| don't specifically subscribe to the idea that restricting
| the speech of others, in exactly the way you want is a
| good idea.
|
| > I can make my own decisions as to how to interact with
| others and don't need you (or anyone else) telling me
| what's acceptable or unacceptable.
|
| > All that said, I have no problem with you spouting off
| about language and I didn't even downvote you. Perhaps my
| example could inspire you to do the same? I won't hold my
| breath.
|
| It's just about being kind to people, nobody9999. That's
| why I submitted my original comment for awareness; it was
| a request, not an instruction.
|
| Given this, I can't say I understand why you're taken
| aback. I don't understand your sense of violation at a
| mere suggestion to show kindness, basically.
|
| I'm not sure I'll ever understand either, and that's
| okay. I wish you the best.
| gjs278 wrote:
| nobody9999 wrote:
| [deleted]
| noptd wrote:
| >as another commenter stated, there's a good argument
| against all of these words too.
|
| As far as I can tell, the other commenter was actually
| making the opposite point (reducto ad absurdum).
| pasabagi wrote:
| Intuitively, I'm sympathetic, then I backdate your argument
| by, say, 50 years, and wonder what words I'd find myself
| defending...
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Yes, some have encouraged people to stop using those for
| similar reasons.
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/words-and-phrases-
| comm...
| ruined wrote:
| generally, yeah. it's always better to criticize some
| actual property of what you're talking about rather than
| try to make derogatory associations with some totally
| unrelated thing.
|
| people pushing these ideas aren't "stupid", they have goals
| you disagree with. explain why the goals are harmful and
| the arguments are misleading.
|
| in a more familiar context, if you are working with someone
| and they are making bad design decisions, calling them
| names isn't likely to be well received, but providing a
| better design is helpful.
|
| here, in online-debate-speak: "stupid" is an ad-hominem
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| At some point there are people in the world who are
| stupid, there are people whose goals are stupid, at some
| point one must be able to describe things as they are.
|
| on edit: not necessarily so that these people are stupid,
| but I think vanishing the concept of stupidity is a worse
| result than just sometimes mistakenly describing people
| as stupid.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > people pushing these ideas aren't "stupid"
|
| GGGP was not calling these individuals stupid, rather,
| their interpretations of the law. And while they're not
| argued by stupid people, you would certainly have to be
| stupid to believe such arguments, e.g. the one at issue
| in this case. I don't think Axel Springer's lawyers are
| stupid. I think they're malicious. I think their argument
| is stupid and one should have to be stupid to believe it.
|
| > in a more familiar context, if you are working with
| someone and they are making bad design decisions, calling
| them names isn't likely to be well received, but
| providing a better design is helpful.
|
| I work with reasonable people. Entities like Axel
| Springer are not reasonable because they have a vested
| financial stake in the matter. Reason and debate won't
| change the money at stake for them.
| khuey wrote:
| Ah, so the "Eastern District of Texas" of Germany then. Good
| context to have, thanks.
| wand3r wrote:
| Yes I have heard of them, only through HN. It is like the US
| Western district of Texas but in Germany right?
| masklinn wrote:
| TIL, I was going to say "eastern not western" but apparently
| after eastern got kneecapped by Heartland western rose to
| prominence because one of its judges is a turd, great.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| It's a local copy of England retained for emergencies: The
| people of Hamburg are seafaring, somewhat arrogant (but not
| without cause), used to bad weather, proud of the Beatles,
| envious of Berlin, and really wrong about libel law.
| andybak wrote:
| Brit here. Hamburg always felt strangely familiar. Now I
| know why.
| adamc wrote:
| Well, I can't fault them for being proud of the Beatles.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Why would british people be envious of Berlin? London is a
| better city in almost every way, and that's coming from an
| outsider to both countries. Berlin isn't even in the top 5
| cities in its own country, lol.
|
| Genuinely curious because most Germans I've met don't
| particularly love Berlin at all, either unless they live
| there. Maybe you are right, and they are just envious
| though .
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| friendlydog wrote:
| How is this different from VidAngel on premise? Remixing content,
| html or video seems the same to me.
| josefx wrote:
| From what I could find Axel Springer failed on multiple fronts.
| For one the court found that the final page layout was the
| result of various highly automated and industrialized processes
| and failed to meet the standard for a unified creative work.
| The court also found that the changes to the pages rendering
| code did not modify its substance, with that the court
| distinguished it from a precedent about cheat software feeding
| false data back to a server.
|
| [1]https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landgericht-hamburg-
| uebe...
| umvi wrote:
| > How is this different from VidAngel
|
| Because Disney got involved with VidAngel, and Disney always
| wins.
|
| The problem is that there's basically no way to stream
| arbitrary video content you own in a way that VidAngel can
| access it client side for filtering. This is because the
| content owners make deals such that the content is only able to
| legally be streamed by certain vendors (Netflix, Amazon, or
| other) and those vendors can put it in their ToS that you
| aren't allowed to modify the stream in any way, etc. VidAngel
| tried to get around it by streaming ripped DVDs and got nailed
| by Disney. They might have been able to last longer had they
| not gotten greedy with the dubious "sellback" program that
| allowed you to remotely buy a DVD and then remotely sell it
| back after viewing it.
|
| The only way I see viable "Family Home Movie Act" style video
| filtering is if you build an open source DB of video metadata
| and use that in conjunction with a VLC plugin or something.
| Then you are responsible for obtaining your own video content,
| which you can edit on the fly with the VLC plugin + open source
| metadata DB.
| [deleted]
| freemint wrote:
| Just so everyone aware there are two Springer media companies.
| One does scientific publishing and one does not. They are
| unrelated.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is an excessively strong claim, one was started by the
| grandson of the founder of the other.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Its a claim publicly made by the older Springer Verlag. They
| ran advertisements in the 60s titling "Springer ist nicht
| Springer".
|
| >Springer isnt Springer. Every chessgame has two knights
| (Springer) which are easy to mix up. In publishing there are
| also two Springer, who dont share anything but the word
| Springer, but are often mixed up as a result.
|
| >... >Between the two publishers no family or economic ties
| exist.
|
| edit: Obviously in the context of the Springer blockade by
| the student movement. The advertisement in question is from
| the Konkret issue number 6 of 1968 page 35 Bad translation
| obviously.
| freemint wrote:
| I am not aware of any ownership relations, overlap of board
| members or them interacting in a comparative manner. I am not
| aware that any in of the two companies the name giving family
| plays a significant role in day to day operations.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Just taking a minute here to say that Eyeo went on a copyright
| offensive to all ad blockers with "ad block" in the name saying
| it infringed on their brand.
|
| Very bad actors in this space, and their motivation here in this
| suit is to continue their AdBlock racket of allowing ads to their
| users for those advertisers that pay.
| anthk wrote:
| > effectively making it illegal for any technology or any
| consumer to alter a website page appearance.
|
| How about using Edbrowse or Lynx?
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Yeah, if Springer would have won, it could very well have meant
| that running a anything from Lynx to a screenreader or even a
| broken (or old) CSS parser would have been illegal. Ridiculous
| premise.
| ydlr wrote:
| Had Axel Springer won the case, it sounds like it would have
| become illegal to scribble marginalia, highlight, or otherwise
| alter the copyrighted content of books I own.
| rsstack wrote:
| Not really. They're claiming that it isn't the _user_ that's
| scribbling on the HTML page, which is why their HTML (their
| customers' HTML specifically) is different from books.
|
| Perhaps it would have limited libraries from re-lending books
| that a patron scribbled on. But not automatically, it would
| require a second court case.
| tgtweak wrote:
| They were trying to make the argument that they html was
| copyright and thus modifying and redistributing it (IE removing
| the ads) without license was infringing. The entirety of the
| consideration was whether programmatically removing ads in the
| page before serving it to the user consisted of redistribution
| or reproduction.
|
| Definitely a stretch attempt at interpretation but not
| surprising and not at all unreasonable.
|
| Your analogy isn't fully sane - You bought the book you're
| scribbling in, and have the right to deface that copy as you
| please, and even resell that copy. You may not reprint it with
| a word whited out and offer it for reproduction or distribution
| as your own.
|
| This side of copyright law is very well established and not
| ambiguous.
| elsjaako wrote:
| I'm nog allowed tot print a new copy of The Hobbit, due to
| copyright.
|
| However, if I buy a legal copy of the Hobbit and edit it using
| whiteout and pen that would be perfectly legal (as far as I
| understand). I could even sell my modified copy.
|
| Isn't this basically what an in-browser ad filter does? Or is my
| understanding wrong here?
| svnpenn wrote:
| I am nog allowed tot say
| jerf wrote:
| Metaphors don't work here. Real browser pages have code which
| could conceivably have EULAs, plus you may be in a EULA for a
| paid service, you have cookie agreements involved (and a
| similar question could be raised, is your browser _obligated_
| to return cookies once given?), the page may also already be
| interactive (if modifying a page is stipulated to be wrong,
| what about browser automation driving something "intended" to
| be manual process? There are contracts the page provider has
| with their advertisers. Things other than the end-user or page
| provider may already have had their fingers in the pie (ISPs
| blocking specific pages, even replacing ads with their own in
| the network). There's a lot of parties involved in a modern
| page with all sorts of relationships to each other. There's
| also a scale here; it's one thing to modify your own copy of a
| book but if you provide a service that modifies other people's
| copies (computer style, with virtually no effort in a fraction
| of a second), how is that different from publishing a modified
| copy? What impact do those differences have on the question?
|
| All of these things are important and none translate into the
| book, or any other simple physical metaphor.
|
| My summary answer would be that the status of ad blocking
| legally is _deeply_ unclear if you really start analyzing it,
| in all sorts of ways, in ways that different legal
| jurisdictions will almost certainly rule differently on for all
| the different individual questions, and almost certainly with
| no coherence between the individual rulings.
| wvenable wrote:
| This is only about copyright and copyright only applies to
| distribution of materials. You are free to modify any
| copyrighted work for your own purposes as long as you don't
| distribute your modifications. Distribution is the key.
| jerf wrote:
| Then, while I'm not convinced it is anywhere near as
| separable as you believe, at the very least the book
| metaphor completely fails to capture the ability to
| distribute modifications as a first-class entity existing
| on its own, in this case, block lists and other HTML
| modification instructions, that can result in millions of
| people getting the "same" modification in their hands.
|
| I called this the "patch hole" in the law over 20 years
| ago, in analogy to the Unix patch tool, and I still don't
| think I've seen a legal system cleanly grapple with what it
| means to be able to distribute modifications on their own.
| It is a qualitatively different process and result than
| having to distribute modified versions directly. It rather
| directly faces a deontology vs. consequentialism
| question... if two different processes (distributing
| changed contents directly vs. distributing patches to an
| end user and providing combination software) produce the
| exact same end results, on what basis will the law decide
| that one is OK and the other is not, since allowing people
| to distribute change lists provides an effective 100%
| workaround to the existing illegality of distributing
| changed works?
|
| I'm not trying to offer an answer here, I'm merely trying
| to establish that talking about "books" isn't going to give
| a good grasp on this situation. The metaphor simply doesn't
| work. It's far too simple to capture too many relevant
| issues.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The difference is that a "patch" implies that it is added
| to exterior content which means that the question of
| copyright infringement passes to how that exterior
| content was obtained.
|
| Patching pirated work is still piracy, but patching work
| you have purchased legitimately (or were given by the
| copyright holder, such as a web page) is not piracy.
| jhgb wrote:
| Has your argument been tested anywhere? I'm quite sure
| that for example in my country it would utterly fail --
| the origin of the work is irrelevant in our copyright
| act.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > It rather directly faces a deontology vs.
| consequentialism question... if two different processes
| (distributing changed contents directly vs. distributing
| patches to an end user and providing combination
| software) produce the exact same end results, on what
| basis will the law decide that one is OK and the other is
| not, since allowing people to distribute change lists
| provides an effective 100% workaround to the existing
| illegality of distributing changed works?
|
| You're going about the question backwards.
|
| If we were basing things on reasonable consequentialism,
| then downloading a modified version of something you
| already legally possess would not be a copyright
| violation.
| wvenable wrote:
| > I'm merely trying to establish that talking about
| "books" isn't going to give a good grasp on this
| situation.
|
| That's a fair point but copyright law was designed with
| "books" in mind so everything is ultimately related to
| that. Computers have really put a wrench in what was
| otherwise a pretty simple system.
| wvenable wrote:
| A patch applied to a singular work for the purposes of
| modifying it, I think the law could easily decide that
| the patch _itself_ is a derivative work of the original.
| A derivative work does not have to contain anything of
| the original -- it just has to be made from it in some
| way.
|
| However, something that it's own generic work or not
| copyrightable (like a block list) would then not be
| considered a derivative work.
| elsjaako wrote:
| How about I distribute a set of pictures with
| instructions on where to paste them in The Hobbit? That's
| like a patch or an ad-blocker. Seems fine to me.
| shkkmo wrote:
| This isn't quite right. The law doesn't stop you from
| selling a book where you have written in the margins, you
| just can't make and distrubute additional copies of the the
| new combined work. Though perhaps you could buy books to
| annotate in bulk and then distribute those legitimat but
| annotated copies. Actually, that is a decent metaphor for
| what an ad blocker is doing.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > I could even sell my modified copy.
|
| Could you? I don't find that at all obvious.
| ivanche wrote:
| Why not? You've never sold one of your used books?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Not one that I had edited to create a meaningfully
| different work from the original.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| You can sell your copy, no matter what you have done to it,
| at least by the First Sale Doctrine in the US, and similar
| elsewhere.
|
| What you can't do is sell the rights to the modified work,
| since they're in addition to the original work. When/if the
| copyright in the original expires, then you can (and you will
| have your own copyright in the modifications if they're
| substantial enough).
|
| Crucially, you also can't make any copies of the modified
| work and sell or distribute them, so your derivative will be
| a legally-enforced one-off.
|
| It doesn't mean that you can't profit from your modification
| of another's work (maybe someone will pay for your
| marginalia), but it does mean that you can't profit from the
| unauthorized duplication of another's work while their
| copyright subsists.
| sabas123 wrote:
| > You can sell your copy, no matter what you have done to
| it, at least by the First Sale Doctrine in the US, and
| similar elsewhere.
|
| If you have a personal created copy of a copyrighted
| product which you do not have the rights to, you don't have
| a right to sell this copy right? (Specifically talking
| about the copy and not the modification)
| elsjaako wrote:
| In the example you don't make a copy.
|
| You buy a physical book (also called "a copy of the
| book"). You don't make the copy, you buy it from a
| legitimate seller.
|
| Then you can modify that physical book, and sell it
| again.
|
| If you want to sell a second one of the work you made,
| you need to buy another physical book (another "copy of
| the Hobbit"), modify that physical object in the same
| way, and sell it again.
|
| You would own the copyright to your changes, so no one
| else could modify "the Hobbit" the same way, and no one
| else could publish instructions on how to do the
| modifications yourself.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The first-sale doctrine says you can sell your copy of a
| copyrighted work. But a copy that you've edited is no
| longer a copy of that copyrighted work; it's a new derived
| work.
|
| Reading the law, it's still not obvious to me that that
| would be legal to sell, and I kind of doubt there is any
| case law on this point.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| It's both: a copy of the original (but, critically, a
| copy made by someone with authorisation to make copies)
| and a copy of your work, which you executed yourself.
|
| You have the right to sell both, one as owner and one as
| owner and creator. But you only have the right to make
| reproductions of your own work, which means if you want
| to make more copies of the complete derivative, you have
| to buy new authorised copies of the original. You don't
| have the rights to make your own copies of the original
| to modify and sell.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > and a copy of your work, which you executed yourself.
|
| But the copyright on derivative works is held jointly by
| both authors.
|
| Do you have any citations of case law backing up your
| interpretation? I'd be really curious to see if a court
| has actually ruled on this.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The copyright on the whole derivative is joint, but the
| the copyright on your contribution only is yours[1, p26].
| If your creative input relies on the original (e.g. you
| interliniated a Harry Potter fanfic into a book), you
| won't be able to sell only your contribution, because the
| original copyright includes the characters and so on and
| extends to your work. However, if you draw decorative
| borders around each page (that are not based on the
| original: no Ravenclaw logos!) you could photocopy the
| pages, isolate the borders and sell them separately, but
| you could not make copies that included copies of (or
| copies of derivations of) the original text.
|
| As for the sale of the physical modified-but-uncopied
| original itself:
|
| In the EU, this is permitted under the equivalent to the
| first sale doctrine[2, p880][3, footnote 7], which covers
| all IP, including trademarks and patents. There's now
| some weirdness around Brexit which is what document [3]
| is all about.
|
| The case law actually goes both ways in the US because
| the concept of derivative work is not conclusively
| defined in statute:
|
| * It's OK: Lee v. Deck the Walls, Inc. [4] aka Lee v.
| A.R.T. Co.
|
| * It's not OK: Greenwich Workshop, Inc. v. Timber
| Creations, Inc. [5], and also Mirage Editions, Inc. v.
| Albuquerque A.R.T. Company
|
| These cases are almost identical and one on each side
| even involves the _same_ defendant, but have opposite
| conclusions. So as usual, the US gets weird and
| jurisdictional with it. So, indeed, my original comment
| is actually wrong in that _US_ First Sale Doctrine isn 't
| guaranteed to apply and mostly seems to depend on the
| circuit you get sued in. TIL.
|
| There are additional rules if the original is limited
| edition or certain types of art (usually "visual" and
| "limited"):
|
| * In the US, VARA means certain creators can, in some
| cases, sue for damages if you destroy or modify their
| work, even if you own it
|
| * In the EU there's the Resale Rights Directive (which
| codifies what is often called droit de suite) which gives
| royalties of each sale to the artist (but this right
| cannot be transferred or inherited)
|
| [1]: https://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/sme/en/documen
| ts/pdf/i...
|
| [2]: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a
| rticle=1...
|
| [3]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/brexit
| _files/i...
|
| [4]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/FSupp/9...
|
| [5]: https://casetext.com/case/greenwich-workshop-inc-v-
| timber-cr...
| ajayyy wrote:
| If you made software that took a legally obtained copy of "The
| Hobbit", modified it locally according to a scripted patch,
| then displayed that to the user, then that would be similar.
| Adblocking happens locally. This is similar to game mods.
| amalcon wrote:
| Somewhat offtopic trivia, but up until 2012 in the US, you
| _were_ actually allowed to print a new copy of The Hobbit. Many
| publishers with no relationship to Tolkien or his estate have
| done this. Due to a quirk in international copyright law, it
| had entered the public domain in the US.
|
| A court ruling in 2012 restored copyright to the work, which is
| super weird since there are a lot of unauthorized copies still
| floating around.
| SahAssar wrote:
| This sounded far too intriguing to not google a bit. I'm
| guessing you're talking about this?
|
| > J.R.R. Tolkien first tangled with copyright law in the
| mid-1960s when ACE Books discovered that the copyrights for
| The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had not been properly
| secured in the United States by his American publisher. ACE
| Books opportunistically published unauthorized paperback
| editions of those books in the United States. Until that time
| Tolkien's books had only been available in hardback. Tolkien
| and his publishers reacted quickly by publishing their own
| authorized paperback editions, but in order to secure
| copyright in the United States again Tolkien was forced to
| revise both stories (thus confusing the issue of what is
| canonical in Middle-earth for his readers).
|
| > There remained a question over the status of the ACE Books
| edition until several years ago, when a long-running
| complaint by the Tolkien Estate was finally settled with
| payment to the author's heirs. Until that time some people in
| the entertainment and publishing industry argued that there
| was still a copyright "hole" pertaining to Tolkien's works in
| the United States.
|
| Source: https://middle-earth.xenite.org/why-are-some-people-
| sued-ove...
| jjk166 wrote:
| They're referring to Golan v Holder, which affirmed that
| the US could retroactively restore copyright to works that
| had fallen into the public domain in the US under the US's
| old copyright laws, but which remained protected by foreign
| copyright laws which the US had adjusted to be in
| compliance with. So basically The Hobbit, like many other
| works, was copyright protected in other countries, but had
| fallen into the public domain in the US; when the US agreed
| to honor the foreign copyrights, it became copyrighted in
| the US as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder
| SahAssar wrote:
| Seems like they are related, from reading
| https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2011/10/one-public-
| dom...
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like
| in the US The Hobbit never formally was under copyright
| due to not fulfilling the requirements when published. It
| remained that way until 1996 when URAA made the UK
| copyright valid in the US. Golan v Holder then affirmed
| that public domain works could be copyrighted under those
| special circumstances.
| sabas123 wrote:
| This example actually popped up in my Patent class. This is
| what I remembered.
|
| You are allowed to create a copy (and thus also in printed
| form) of copyrighted material, _only_ for private and personal
| use. i.e you _must_ recreate it yourself.
|
| As for selling a modified version, if it isn't modified enough
| than you still infringe copyright of the original author. With
| "enough" being something that needs to be defended in court if
| challenged.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Can you have your kid or personal assistant do that for you?
|
| Over-the-trope example: A wealthy old English aristocrat's
| head butler brings in his master's evening paper at the
| kitchen door. Then snips out any stories "which might
| disagree with master's digestion", before presenting the
| paper to the old blue blood.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > As for selling a modified version, if it isn't modified
| enough than you still infringe copyright of the original
| author. With "enough" being something that needs to be
| defended in court if challenged.
|
| Hang on. Does "modified version" mean the same physical copy
| I bought and then modified, or a copy I made myself and then
| modified?
|
| The way you worded that sounds like you're talking about
| _both_ , but the former makes no sense. Why would it be a
| copyright violation to buy a book, white-out one sentence,
| and resell it? And elsjaako was definitely talking about the
| former.
| elsjaako wrote:
| Exactly, I meant modifying a physical copy (like a physical
| book from a shelf in a store), never actually copying
| anything in there.
|
| I would be very interested to learn I was wrong about that.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You must be wrong, or literally every used textbook with
| notes in the margins is infringing on copyright. Although
| you could be correct, it's just literally unenforceable.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| > Why would it be a copyright violation to buy a book,
| white-out one sentence, and resell it? //
|
| Because of exhaustion of rights working on first sale of
| right to _make_ derivative copyright works not being
| exhausted on sale.
|
| In USA under Fair Use you have pretty liberal rights
| compared to most other copyright regimes AFAICT. In the UK
| we don't have rights, not even under Fair Dealing, to
| modify works, never mind sell modified works (without
| permission of the copyright holder); they made an exception
| to allow caching to make web browsing lawful!
|
| I can't buy your book, edit out part I don't like and
| resell it as your book, and I can't sell it as my book
| without your permission. Not even one copy. That's
| reasonable to me (unless there was a [implied] license for
| modifications to be made, say). I should of course be
| allowed to modify the physical copy I purchased as that's
| ordinary use and copyright shouldn't interfere with that.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| That reminds me of the PureFlix case years ago. Their shtick
| was editing movies to be more "Christian-friendly". So what
| they did was heavily edit a movie and burn it to a disk and
| ship it to you. What they did was they also bought a legit
| copy of the movie on disk and damaged the disk to unusuable.
| They shipped you both, so you had a working edited disk and a
| broken original.
|
| IIRC, they lost the case but I do see the merits in their
| arguments.
| tylorr wrote:
| What about if I bought a book from a bookstore then I wrote
| in the margins or highlighted some text and then sold it to
| used bookstore?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In my personal opinion the modification is insubstantial so
| for copyright purposes you haven't created a derivative
| work. There are probably ways you could make it substantial
| but how would the rights holders ever know. It might
| technically be a tort but there's no damage; what would a
| rights holder win?
| nybble41 wrote:
| > It might technically be a tort but there's no damage;
| what would a rights holder win?
|
| Statutory damages.
|
| Which highlights the essential flaw in allowing statutory
| damages.
| elsjaako wrote:
| Turns out I'm wrong, at least in Germany and France.
|
| Authors have "moral rights of integrity" over their work, which
| means you can't modify a work without permission of the author,
| even if you own it.
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Moral_right_of_int...
| jhgb wrote:
| I'm mildly skeptical that a court would accept this reasoning
| in cases of works with many copies and someone making a
| change to one such personal copy.
| contravariant wrote:
| Well that's a bloody stupid idea.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| German law, the same as other continental law systems, doesn't
| know anything about precedents, which are specific to Anglo-Saxon
| law systems.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > German law,
|
| Could be.
|
| > the same as other continental law systems, doesn't know
| anything about precedents,
|
| That's a rather strong and wide ranging claim that seems eadily
| refuted.
|
| The doctrine of precedent exists in Norwegian law, see
| https://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/39-14.pdf
|
| Or were you being ultra-traditional and treating Scandinavia as
| separate from Europe?
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Of course, German justice system knows precedents in civil law.
| Usually, courts respect higher courts' decisions. So once there
| is a ,,Leiturteil" i.e. a decisive court ruling, you stand no
| chance when you sue sb based on your personal interpretation of
| the law before whatever court you file your case.
| userbinator wrote:
| This is a good decision because the alternative could lead to
| absurdities like "is it legal to change the channel, turn away,
| or even close your eyes if an advert appears on TV?"
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| This doesn't have to win, it just needs to get discussed until
| enough corporations make a stink about this before extensions
| become "illegal".
|
| Just like DRM, DCMA and many other total nonsense systems, they
| just need to "appear" like something is bad before Google/Firefox
| end all extensions entirely.
|
| What is the defense for this?
| armagon wrote:
| I think the defence is the market speaking. I'm not going to
| regularly use a browser that I can't do ad-blocking in (or,
| indeed, other extensions), and I'm not going to recommend it to
| other people. The browsers technically-minded people install
| for their family and friends do really make a difference.
| durnygbur wrote:
| nness wrote:
| What an absurd case, so glad it would found in Eyeo's favour.
|
| > More dangerous still, any developer who writes code for an
| offending browser feature could be liable to pay damages
|
| If you take this one step further, any browser vendor would be
| liable for changes to their product if that change broke a
| person's site, i.e. deprecation of any features. The mind boggles
| at how horrific it could've been for the future of the web.
| Mesopropithecus wrote:
| And worse yet, imagine you're liable for not supporting each
| and every new web standard that there is 100%, right away. Just
| to illustrate how absurd such a ruling would have been.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I was wondering how Eyeo prevailed, given the "no derivative
| works" aspect of copyright law. They mention an interesting
| distinction I've never run across before in copyright:
|
| > The final 2021 Hamburg court decision, as successfully defended
| by eyeo, establishes that there is a limit to copyright after
| which the website author can no longer assert any right of
| retention. This limit boundary exists between the code provision
| level and the code execution level.
|
| The article doesn't go into much detail beyond this, sadly.
|
| It's a bit odd to me that they focus so much on HTML. Presumably
| they would apply similar logic to JavaScript and CSS, but they
| didn't mention them.
| sbx320 wrote:
| Yeah, the linked article is very shallow. Heise [0] goes a bit
| more into detail, sadly the actual ruling isn't available yet.
|
| Quick Summary from the Heise article: Axel Springer tried to
| claim that the website itself is a copyrighted work and
| therefore an adblocker would not be allowed to modify it.
| However the court decided:
|
| 1) Removing elements (ads) from being displayed does not modify
| the originally transferred HTML, but only the data structures
| as generated by the browser, which is allowed to be modified by
| the user. Otherwise using a browser without images would also
| be in breach of copyright.
|
| 2) The website in itself is not a copyrighted work, as there's
| no original creative effort involved in generating the HTML.
|
| [0] (in German) https://www.heise.de/news/Landgericht-Hamburg-
| Adblocker-vers...
| mminer237 wrote:
| I don't know German law, but "no derivative works" generally
| only applies to things you reproduce yourself. If you download
| a webpage, it's not copyright infringement to hit F12 and edit
| a paragraph. You're not distributing a derivative copy. You're
| just modifying the reproduction you were implicitly licensed by
| the web server delivering it to you. If editing the HTML on
| your own machine was illegal reproduction, just viewing it
| would be too. (And in American law, if something is publicly
| viewable, they can't condition your license to additional terms
| you aren't required to agree to first. See _hiQ Labs v.
| LinkedIn Corp._ : https://matthewminer.name/law/briefs/Miscella
| neous/hiQ+Labs+....)
| onli wrote:
| The site you look at is a product of the browser after it
| interpreted the HTML. While the HTML may be protected by
| copyright, whatever the browser makes of it is not touched by
| said author copyright. The browser is free to manipulate it
| however it wants, and therefore the user is as well. This
| includes the free use of adblockers. JS just does not matter
| here as it also only manipulates HTML, CSS is just important
| for styling the HTML.
|
| That would be my guess without having read the decision.
|
| Also, no derivative work because there is no work that is
| published. You are always free to modify copyright protected
| work, publishing it is the problem. It seems like this would
| have been a second hurdle for Springer, but they got stopped
| before this important fact even came up.
|
| Utter defeat for the evil ones.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| It wasn't obvious from the title but this is about ad blocking
| being ruled a non-infringement. See also:
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/adblocking-does-not-constitute-copy...
|
| which made it near the top of Reddit r/news.
| wvenable wrote:
| I'm confused. The HTML on a page should be automatically
| copyrighted to the author already. It's absolutely an expression
| of creative work just like a book, or software, or music.
|
| That being said, it doesn't follow that it would make it illegal
| for any technology or any consumer to alter a website page
| appearance. You are free to modify copyrighted works as long as
| you don't distribute that work.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think the argument would be that a browser add-on, such as an
| ad-blocker, is essentially redistributing the work because it
| is modifying the HTML of another author and then displaying it
| to the browser user. Of course it is really the browser _user_
| who is doing the modifying - the extension is just their tool -
| I 'm not sure if that is the basis of the ruling.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > [The ad-blocker is] modifying the HTML of another author
| and then displaying it to the browser user
|
| But ... that's what the browser itself does. We aren't shown
| raw HTML, we're shown a user-friendly rendering of that HTML.
| [deleted]
| thomasahle wrote:
| Interesting. So could I publish a modified book, by
| publishing a piece of software, that transforms a known book
| into a new book. Then the user would be doing the
| modification.
|
| Would that not be legal, as long as my software doesn't
| contain pieces of the original book copied verbatim?
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| It definitely should be legal, especially as the user would
| still have to get the original book to use it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can sell software that decompiles, disassembles and
| recompiles software. Same thing with software that
| manipulates and edits existing copyrighted videos.
|
| Publishing it, however, is where copyright law kicks in.
| Publishing is a specific right that you need to be granted
| by the rights holders.
|
| I don't see how software running on a client's computer
| that changes rendering of copywritten work is the same
| thing as publication. Browsers, video players and Adobe's
| products all allow users to view and modify copyrighted
| works on their machines, and that isn't publication at all.
| OlleTO wrote:
| IANAL (and in the EU) - I believe you're not allowed to
| republish/redistribute the modified copy of the book. That
| said, your software is still legal for an end user to use
| on any book they own.
|
| Same thing here, if the modifications were happening on the
| server side and then sent to your browser that's probably
| not legal
| TomasEkeli wrote:
| rather - you could sell a pair of glasses with yellow-
| tinted glass that transforms how any book looks. that's
| perfectly fine.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I can buy a photography book and view it with super cool
| vintage Rayban Kalichrome sunglasses thereby altering the
| colors of the photographs.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can in some cases. Copyright law varies from country to
| country, check with a lawyer if you need advice, and all
| that... If what remains of the copyright work is less than
| 10% then your copy is legal. When you modify something it
| becomes a derived work, the question is when you have
| modified it enough that it is considered a unique work and
| not derived.
|
| Note too that trademark law can still apply. So your Harry
| Potter can be in trouble even if the only thing that
| remains is the name and the universe. (You can do a Harry
| Potter as the horse in your western novel)
| pkilgore wrote:
| This comment is misleadingly reductive of complicated
| questions of both Copyright and Trademark, I suggest you
| take it down to avoid misleading people. Parts of it are
| blatantly incorrect under U.S. (majority of readership
| here)[1], other statements "you can do a Harry Potter..."
| are conjecture that bury the actual legal question a
| court would consider (likelihood of confusion), and no
| lawyer in their right mind would offer such a
| unconditional opinion without knowing specific facts of
| specific cases.
|
| [1] See. e.g., https://grr.com/publications/copyright-
| myth-ten-percent-rule...
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The way I see it, an ad-blocker is like a bottle of white-
| out. Say you buy a book and take it home, inside the book you
| find ads on various pages so you take your bottle of white-
| out and mark them out. You haven't caused any copyright
| infringement because you're not redistributing your book that
| has the white-out on it.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > You haven't caused any copyright infringement because
| you're not redistributing your book that has the white-out
| on it.
|
| Even if you did... since when has distributing a used book
| with extra notes, highlighting, or even white-out in place
| been considered copyright infringement? You're selling an
| existing, authorized copy--even if it was later modified--
| not making a new one.
| nine_k wrote:
| This puts services like Pocket or Instapaper under doubt.
|
| While in a browser the "reader mode" or an and blocker may
| reformat content and remove ads, etc, it's done strictly
| for the browser's user, the modified version is not
| distributed.
|
| But e.g. Pocket allows to share a "pocketed" article with
| all the ads and most formatting removed; they even
| advertise some articles on their homepage. This may count
| as distribution of a derived work. They of course give the
| credits and a link to the original, but I wonder if some
| publishers might be unhappy enough to challenge this.
| jhgb wrote:
| > is essentially redistributing the work because it is
| modifying the HTML of another author and then displaying it
| to the browser user
|
| There are still only two legal entities involved - the
| operator of the web site, and the user displaying a page from
| the web site. What's the third entity that would redistribute
| a modified work to the user displaying a page from the web
| site?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You are free to modify copyrighted works as long as you don't
| distribute that work.
|
| That's...not quite right.
|
| You are free to modify _a legally owned physical copy of_ a
| copyrighted work (and to redistribute that modified copy), but
| you are not free to make a derivative work by copying-with-
| modifications, except (in the US) insofar as that falls within
| the bounds of fair use (and where it does, you can also
| distribute it.)
| guelo wrote:
| You can make a derivative work as much as you want to, you
| just can't redistribute it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You can make a derivative work as much as you want to,
| you just can't redistribute it.
|
| Well, no one is likely to know if you don't redistribute
| it, but legally, no, you may not:
|
| 17 USC SS 106: "Subject to sections 107 through 122, the
| owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive
| rights to do and to authorize any of the following: [...]
| (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted
| work;"
| wvenable wrote:
| This does seem to be the correct interpretation. The
| consequence is that even reading a book aloud at home
| would be a violation of copyright. However, that would
| likely be defensible in court as fair use, if it came to
| that.
| nprateem wrote:
| > It's absolutely an expression of creative work just like a
| book, or software, or music.
|
| Bollocks. It's a data markup language.
| nikanj wrote:
| So are musical notes
| nprateem wrote:
| Only if you're autistic
| nmstoker wrote:
| How about the screws and bolts on an original piece of
| furniture? Are they excluded from the creative work because
| they're some sort of standard item?
| shdon wrote:
| Completely unrelated to the content of the article, but I find
| this website very annoying to read as it changes the scrolling
| behaviour adding some inertia. It takes a fraction of a second to
| stop scrolling after I've stopped moving the mousewheel. This
| makes me continually overshoot and having to compensate by
| scrolling back a few lines because the part I wanted to read is
| no longer in the viewport. When will web developers learn not to
| mess with the default browser behaviour?
|
| As for the actual content of the article, I'm happy that the
| court recognised the technical reality of the case.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Websites changing scrolling behavior is so infuriating to me
| that I've considered doing my own Firefox builds that remove
| the JavaScript functions for changing the scroll position.
|
| I can't for the life of me figure out why web devs think they
| need to re-implement smooth scrolling. Web browsers already do
| it out of the box, and trying to re-implement it never works in
| all browsers.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| The explanation doesn't make sense. Of course the HTML code of a
| web site should be copyrighted.
|
| The issue is whether this implies it should be consumed in a
| certain way (ie rendered by a certain browser), which obviously
| should be a no. And the other issue is whether a plugin or
| "browser" that modifies it (in the client) should be considered
| to be publishing a modified version. That should obviously also
| be a no.
|
| From the article it is not clear if any of those concerns have
| even been addressed properly.
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