In order to please the requests a large publisher (Axel Springer), #Germany may be on the verge of making ad-blockers illegal - and, worse, anything that modifies a Web page before or after rendering.

Axel Springer has an open lawsuit against Eyeo (the maker of Adblock Plus).

Publishers or Big Tech companies waging war against browsers and extensions culprit of blocking their juicy ads+tracking revenues aren't anything new. But this time the argument is a very dangerous one.

The argument is that the source code of a website (its HTML, JS and CSS) is copyrighted content intended to be rendered as-is on a client's device.

Therefore ad-blockers, by intercepting or blocking requests made through this copyrighted content, or modifying the DOM it renders, are breaking copyright laws.

In 2022, the Hamburg appeal court ruled that Adblock Plus did not infringe the copyright of websites, but rather it was merely facilitating a choice by users about how they wished their browser to render the page.

Unfortunately, on July 31, the German Federal Supreme Court partially overturned the decision of the Hamburg court and remanded the case for further proceedings. The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.

The statement that a website as a whole, including its 3rd-party integrations (such as ads/trackers SDKs), is copyrighted content intended to be rendered without modifications only on the clients supported by the author is an extremely dangerous one.

It goes against everything that HTTP and HTML have always been.

Not only it would make ad-blockers illegal, but it'd make anything that alters the flow of an HTTP session illegal.

Think of things like Greasemonkey scripts to change the style of some webpages. Or accessibility extensions that modify the contrast and font size of a page. Or things like Firefox's Reader Mode, often used by blind people to distill webpages before feeding their content to a screen reader. Or even just inspecting and manually modifying the DOM of a Web page through the browser's dev tools.

And what if I do the blocking on DNS level, through something like Pihole? Would a DNS block towards a domain I don't want to be rendered on my devices be illegal too?

If I acquired some content in a legal way (e.g. through an HTTP request to an openly accessible website), then I'm free to do whatever I can with that content, for personal usage, once it reaches my device.

Imagine a law that makes it illegal to install another OS on a computer or phone that you regularly purchased.

Or use alternative clients to render your chats.

Or use a text-based browser with a minimal JS engine to access a Website.

A law that wouldn't just imply a void warranty in these cases - just make them straight out illegal, as in "copyright infringment" illegal.

It would be the biggest blow to the way the Internet is built - around open protocols open to all kind of implementations and messages open to all kind and manipulations on each step of the route.

It would set a very dangerous precedent towards an over-reaching definition of copyright that could also mandate on what devices and under what condition some HTTP content should be rendered (and it's not such a far-fetched dystopia: look no further than the DRM implementations).

And it would violate other EU laws (like the DMA) which are exactly meant to foster accessibility, inter-compatibility, freedom of implementation and modification of online content acquired through legal means.

And what's most ironic is that blocking ads or modifying the CSS of a webpage may amount to copyright infringment, but massive scraping done by AI models may not.

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2025/08/14/is-germany-on-the-brink-of-banning-ad-blockers-user-freedom-privacy-and-security-is-at-risk/