Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal precedent for who ‘owns’ HTML

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]

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[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors

[2] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1477665332156420096

They'll also mistakenly introduce bugs to destroy your on-site metrics if you don't pay up.

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.

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, ... .

It was a great deal for everyone, but people who installed ABP.

Why is this? Would you also say this for other long running open source projects which have never breach the trust of their users?

Not exactly the acceptable ads must conform to the standard that is defined by the acceptable ads Committee which consists of publishers users, and distribution. Something like that.

That seems like just an implementation detail. If users are able to choose/vote what is "acceptable" that seems like a concept worth trying.

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.

If you live in the city, advertisers manipulate you every waking minute of your day, bombarding you from billboards, on tv, on the internet, and are constantly shoving their disgusting garbage in front of your eyes in new ways; at petrol pumps, on your tv menu, right in front of you on a taxi cab.

Worse still, the more you pay to avoid this trash, the more you become attractive to them as someone with money to spend. I can't remove the ads as a walk about the city, but for damn sure I'll remove them wherever I can in my home. Pi hole, ublock origin, sponsor block etc, all running to keep this crap out of my life. If people wont pay money for what creators are making, and they can't provide it for free, I'm fine with it going away. It probably wasn't worthwhile to begin with - only "addictive".

Ads are a scourge and make me sick. There are no "acceptable ads".

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

Right under the ad was a gigantic message that said “contact-less trademark owned by and used with permission of EMVCo, LLC”

I can imagine the airline’s surprise if they have originally printed ads without this.

At least movies cost millions of dollars and presumably we as a society will get more books if authors don't also have to make french fries. What protection do fonts need?

I've read several articles bloviating about this or that font, describing it like a wine taster would write about a wine, and would just come away rolling my eyes.

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.

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.

Same thing here, if the modifications were happening on the server side and then sent to your browser that's probably not legal

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)

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.

By the way, Axel Springer SE, the "media" company suing, is investing heavily into the US market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE

Well, no one is likely to know if you don't redistribute it, but legally, no, you may not:

17 USC § 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;”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder

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.

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)

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.

I would be very interested to learn I was wrong about that.

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.

I write a book about the suffering of a particular minority. The book sells internationally and earns awards. My name becomes recognised globally.

Someone buys many copies of the book, modifies them to say the opposite of my intended point, making me look like, say, a racist, and distributes it.

Now is it stupid?

My point is your name being attached to a particular piece of work means you're name is directly associated with that work and what it represents. Any changes to the work could alter the perception that others have of you, towards the negative, and you've done nothing wrong.

We've recently seen what happens in a post-truth society when someone says something (usually online) that's not true about another person and the negativity generated towards that person happens before the truth is revealed (and promptly ignored anyway.)

Do we really need more of that?

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.

The most relevant case I know of is Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of Am., Inc., 964 F.2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992). Nintendo sued sued the maker of Game Genie for contributing to infringement by letting people essentially edit their games in memory. The court said that just being in memory isn't a fixed medium for it to count as a derivative work, saying that editing something in memory was akin to shining a kaleidoscope on a painting and therefore not infringment. However, I think this requirement of a derivative being "concrete" is something the California judges largely just made up.

But even if it was infringement, the court still said it was fair use because it was for a non-commercial purpose and couldn't have any negative effects on game sales, the 1st and 4th factors involved in fair use under 17 USC § 107.

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 .