Germany's Federal Court of Justice revived Axel Springer's lawsuit against Adblock Plus maker Eyeo, ruling that ad-blockers may infringe copyright by altering website code. The case returns to Hamburg for reevaluation. This decision could disrupt global ad tech, user privacy, and online publishing models.
Now, I’m no legal expert, particularly not in the workings of German copyright law. But an ad blocker does not “manipulate a site’s structure”, so copyright seems like very shakey grounds for a legal argument. All adblockers do is block connections to specific domains, and then what you see is what the website’s server spits out without downloading info from those outside domains. AFAIK there is no adblocker that is editing a website’s actual code, but maybe some of the advanced YT adblockers are doing that, idk.
The problem is even if the “structure” is being manipulated, the web site is freely sharing data to your computer. HTML is just data. Code is just data also, there is no reasonable guarantee that random code you hand out on the internet can run on what you hand it to.