Daniel Nazer of Mozilla writes:
Across the internet, users rely on browsers and extensions to shape how they experience the web: to protect their privacy, improve accessibility, block harmful or intrusive content, and take control over what they see. But a recent ruling from Germany’s Federal Supreme Court risks turning one of these essential tools, the ad blocker, into a copyright liability — and in doing so, threatens the broader principle of user choice online.
Imagine you are watching television and you go to the kitchen for a snack during an ad break. Or you press the fast-forward button to skip some ads while listening to a podcast. Or perhaps you get a newspaper delivered to your house, and you see that it includes a special section made up of hallucinated AI content, so you drop the inset into the trash before taking the rest of the paper inside. Were these acts of copyright infringement? Of course not. But if you do something like this with a browser extension, a recent decision from the German Federal Supreme Court suggests that maybe you did infringe copyright. This misguided logic risks user freedom, privacy, and security.
Read more at Mozilla’s Blog.
h/t, Risky Biz News