Is Germany on the brink of banning ad blockers?

I do not do that. Thus, the example is irrelevant. Though it might actually be a good example as to how people use excuses like that to violate others' liberty even when they're not engaged in that particular reprehensible activity. Even before you finished reading that sentence, the little "but you might" thought popped up in your head.

>It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.

I don't dispute that it is proscribed. I simply do not care. When copyright maximalists have to stoop to "what about child pornography" arguments, I think it is more than reasonable that people simply stop listening right at that point. Nothing else they say can or should ever matter.

I’m asking that they don’t go out of their way to take expensive and complex technical or legal steps that prevent me from bringing my own accommodations with me, ones that have zero effect on other visitors and cost the owner zero time, effort, and money.

Yes, I’m sure they’d prefer I watched the squares of pixels they sold to 3rd parties. I also bet they’d prefer not to have to pay to install a wheelchair ramp, but they don’t get to make that decision, either.

The supreme court actually has rejected most of Axel Springer's² arguments and limited the revision to a single question (AFAICT, IANAL): Are the news websites in question some kind of computer program (protected under Section 8 of the UrhG³). The supreme court argues that the lower court did not sufficiently discuss this question in their ruling.

The supreme court explicitly notes that the lower court should also consider whether Springer actually has the sole rights to the 'computer program'.

Some thoughts:

a) As the supreme court mentioned, Springer might only own (exclusive) copyright to some parts of the computer program. It seems that they embed a lot of other JS code, e.g., Google stuff. This might mean that Springer needs to show that ABP actually modifies Springer's code. If ABP modifies e.g. AdSense code or the code of an open source library that Springer's websites use, Springer's copyright might not be infringed at all.

b) In German copyright law, only works are protected that are created by a human author. (Obviously, the author can also use software to create a protected work.) Given that a lot of JS/CSS code is written by automated rules (or LLMs), rights holders might need to prove that an actual human wrote the code.

c) As posted elsewhere in the thread: the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version⁴. So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software.

(A mentioned above: I am not a lawyer. Copyright law is complicated and interpretations are evolving)

¹)https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...

²) big German media conglomerate, not to be confused with SpringerNature

³) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/BJNR012730965.html#B...

⁴) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__45b.html

See Mirage Editions v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341 (1988) [1] and Lee v. A.R.T. Co., 125 F.3d 580 (1997) [2].

The first, in the 9th circuit, involved a company whose business was:

> 1) purchasing artwork prints or books including good quality artwork page prints therein; 2) gluing each individual print or page print onto a rectangular sheet of black plastic material exposing a narrow black margin around the print; 3) gluing the black sheet with print onto a major surface of a rectangular white ceramic tile; 4) applying a transparent plastic film over the print, black sheet and ceramic tile surface; and 5) offering the tile with artwork mounted thereon for sale in the retail market.

The appeals court found that this was a copyright infringement.

The second, in the 7th circuit, involved the same defendants who bought an artists' notecards and small lithographs from a retail art store and:

> mounted the works on ceramic tiles (covering the art with transparent epoxy resin in the process) and resold the tiles.

The 7th circuit found that this was not an infringement.

There were some differences in the cases, in particular in the 9th circuit case the defendant was buying art books and cutting out the pictures to mount and sell but in the second case they were buying individual notecards and lithographs to mount and sell.

As far as I know this has never reached the Supreme Court, and neither case has been overturned in its circuit by subsequent cases in that circuit, and so Mirage is still the law in the 9th and Lee still the law in the 7th. In other circuits there have been district court cases that dealt with this issue, but it has not reached their appellate courts.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/856...

[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/125...