How ridiculous. A browser must process the HTML/CSS provided in order to render it, and the way in which it does so is subject to variation, and in particular may be modified to the user’s...
How ridiculous. A browser must process the HTML/CSS provided in order to render it, and the way in which it does so is subject to variation, and in particular may be modified to the user’s preference. Should we say that when a website tries to use a feature which is deprecated, and the browser thus ignores the relevant code, the browser is performing an illegal modification to copyrighted code? Perhaps we should say that when a compiler optimises a program, it illegally modifies the source the code?
Of course, a court of law will never consider these things because they do not understand how technology works.
Obviously, changing the default font on your web browser violates so much copyright that we all should be in jail anyway. Of all the arguments, copyright. Jeez.
Obviously, changing the default font on your web browser violates so much copyright that we all should be in jail anyway.
I don't know how the German legal system works, but the US legal system is common law, meaning the law is heavily defined by precedent. This ruling passing here would have a lot of hugely damaging...
I don't know how the German legal system works, but the US legal system is common law, meaning the law is heavily defined by precedent. This ruling passing here would have a lot of hugely damaging implications, all boiling down to the fact that you no longer own your computer.
If you have a record player and you buy a record, you can scratch that record up, modify it, do whatever you want to it and play it, as long as you're not distributing that modified record. This would do away with the equivalent for computers.
Anything that modifies the runtime behavior of an application would be made illegal by this. Antivirus applications, overlays, anti cheat software, password managers, hell, operating systems themselves.
The idea is really misguided. I own my computer. I should be the one who gets to make the final decision on what does and does not run on it, and how. You being a software developer doesn't give you the authority to decide what happens with my personal property.
The German legal system is notably not a common law system, but a civil law system. One of the principle differences is that German courts are not bound by the precedent of previous court decisions.
I don't know how the German legal system works, but the US legal system is common law, meaning the law is heavily defined by precedent.
The German legal system is notably not a common law system, but a civil law system. One of the principle differences is that German courts are not bound by the precedent of previous court decisions.
Yeah, people really trying to exploit the lack of understanding on how a computer works. You ask for data and are given data. You're not obligated to consume all data. This is the equivalent of...
Yeah, people really trying to exploit the lack of understanding on how a computer works. You ask for data and are given data. You're not obligated to consume all data. This is the equivalent of saying that it's infringement to walk away from your TV during a commercial.
I assume that major browsers would comply by delisting adblockers from their official extension stores. That would be enough to prevent 99% of users from accessing them. They would probably have...
I assume that major browsers would comply by delisting adblockers from their official extension stores. That would be enough to prevent 99% of users from accessing them. They would probably have some legal means to also pursue the maintainers, or at least hosts of open source projects - GitHub would probably comply with lawful requests to take down or geo-restrict access to repositories.
This is often the issue: in principle these laws shouldn’t be enforceable, but often due to our reliance on particular gatekeepers, it is enough if the relevant government can convince that entity to comply with their requests.
A Lawsuit by Axel-Springer. The German FOX News, on it's way to making Germany a more and more backwards country. Depressing. Fun Fact: The CEO of Axel Springer got a 1 Billion Euro gift by the...
A Lawsuit by Axel-Springer. The German FOX News, on it's way to making Germany a more and more backwards country. Depressing.
Fun Fact: The CEO of Axel Springer got a 1 Billion Euro gift by the widower of Axel Springer. He paid a total of 0€ in taxes on that, because he "didn't have money" to pay the tax. Because he bought 284 million Euro in shares of Axel Spinger SE.
https://www.juhn.com/fachwissen/erbschaftsteuer-schenkungsteuer/axel-springer-aktien-schenkung-steuerfrei/ here's a German lawyer breaking it down, if you translate it it will give you the full...
here's a German lawyer breaking it down, if you translate it it will give you the full picture. But from what I understand it's very specific to gifts/inheritance. Here's a ChatGPT summary of that article ( I have checked that the statements are the same as in the legal article, but I would've struggled translating the legal jargon :D)
⸻
Key Mechanism
1. Prior Share Purchase
• Before the gift, Döpfner bought shares worth €276 million (4.1%) from the Friede Springer Stiftung.
• His overall stake rose to 6.9%.
• This purchase likely aimed to reduce his available wealth, making him eligible for a tax exemption.
2. Tax Law Basis
• § 13b ErbStG: Shares in a company with at least 25% shareholder participation can be treated as begünstigtes Vermögen (favored business assets).
• Friede Springer held 42.6% → condition met.
• Normally, only up to €26 million of such gifts can be partly tax-free (Verschonungsabschlag). Above ~€90 million, no relief applies.
3. § 28a ErbStG – Verschonungsbedarfsprüfung
• Provides full tax exemption for gifts over €26 million if:
• The transferred assets qualify as begünstigtes Vermögen.
• The recipient has no other available wealth to pay tax.
• Because Döpfner had just invested nearly all his liquid assets into buying more shares, his verfügbares Vermögen (available wealth) was effectively zero.
• Thus, he could apply for a full waiver of gift tax.
Yeah, it's pretty nuts that shares aren't treated as wealth. Most billionaires in the US don't keep a lot of cash in their bank accounts, that would be a waste of money. Their assets are mostly...
Yeah, it's pretty nuts that shares aren't treated as wealth. Most billionaires in the US don't keep a lot of cash in their bank accounts, that would be a waste of money. Their assets are mostly tied up in shares, real estate, or other assets. Seems like an insanely easy way to get out of paying taxes.
You are absolutely taxed on shares when you receive them, at your regular income tax rate. Then you're taxed again on sale, for capital gains (unless they had no increase in value or lost value),...
Exemplary
You are absolutely taxed on shares when you receive them, at your regular income tax rate. Then you're taxed again on sale, for capital gains (unless they had no increase in value or lost value), at your regular income tax rate for short term sales or at a reduced 15% if you hold the shares for over a year.
The way wealthy people avoid taxes is by taking out long term loans (which are not taxable, for obvious reasons) with shares as collateral. They don't sell the shares, but still gain liquidity, and then when they die the creditor gets their payout and their wealth would have grown enough to eclipse the value of the loan anyway.
Most wealth is dynastic, hence the opposition to inheritance taxes. Someone paid taxes on income generations ago, but now it's grown to a bundle of assets with billions and gets passed on, and you can use loans to generate liquidity without touching the assets that keep growing in value.
Additional taxes on capital gains would just further fuck the professional class over, since RSUs and ESPPs can be a large part of workers' compensation.
Arguing that the way you locally display otherwise legally obtained data (e.g. a website you receive from a webserver) may constitute copyright infringement is absolutely insane... One can only...
Arguing that the way you locally display otherwise legally obtained data (e.g. a website you receive from a webserver) may constitute copyright infringement is absolutely insane... One can only hope the lawsuit gets dismissed once again. Otherwise we'll have to deal with some grim implications for all kinds of development activities, usage of all sorts of visualization tools, and so many other usecases. :S
I think that if this were to happen there is a good chance there would be an unforeseen mental shift that makes this backfire. Basically if ad blocking and piracy are both breaking the same rules...
I think that if this were to happen there is a good chance there would be an unforeseen mental shift that makes this backfire. Basically if ad blocking and piracy are both breaking the same rules in the same way then it's a lot easier to make the mental jump to not caring about copyright infringement at all.
Anecdotally the thing that caused me to pretty much stop caring about personal use copyright infringement was how difficult it has become to back up my own media that I paid for physical copies of. A sort of "if I'm going to be treated the same for doing things I should be allowed to then why am I even bothering with the harder path?"
While this is from the US, I feel Germany isn't generally more generous. From Circular 33, emphasis mine. I can't imagine a sane world where "arbitrary ad injected into page" would remotely...
While this is from the US, I feel Germany isn't generally more generous. From Circular 33, emphasis mine.
As a general rule, the Office will not accept a claim to copyright in “format” or “layout.” The general layout or format of a book, page, book cover, slide presentation, web page, poster, or form is uncopyrightable because it is a template for expression. Copyright protection may be available for the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the specific content that is selected and arranged in a sufficiently creative manner. The claim, however, would be limited to the selection and arrangement of that specific content, not to the selection and arrangement of any content in that particular manner.
I can't imagine a sane world where "arbitrary ad injected into page" would remotely qualify as a creative expression. HTML/CSS is templating. A way of arranging content, not content itself (mostly). Sure, you can make a sufficiently cretive template, and could be copywritten in that case, but I'm reasonably certain they're not creating art with their page layouts.
It really seems like we've been nosediving towards the cyberpunk ethos in recent months, just without the cool technology. The surveillance state is in and internet freedom is out, we'll watch our...
It really seems like we've been nosediving towards the cyberpunk ethos in recent months, just without the cool technology. The surveillance state is in and internet freedom is out, we'll watch our ads and brainrot and nothing else and we'll be happy. It's depressing as hell and I can't see a way out. It's all well and good to vote and contact representatives (things I do and tell my friends to do also) but the strategy seems to be pushing these anti-privacy laws over and over and over again until one day they inevitably succeed, moving the line further and further towards authoritarianism.
Once we give up a freedom to a government, we never, ever get it back without revolution, political or otherwise. Once a law is passed that, say, allows the government to backdoor any and all encryption, there is absolutely no way of convincing any future government to give up that power over us. So the strategy is to strip a little freedom away, wait until people stop caring, then strip another, and another, until they have everything. That's what all of this is. Porn bans, anti-encryption laws, adblock bans. Each thing is a small but permanent step toward authoritarianism. They only have to win once; we have to win every time.
I'd put that in the realm of political revolution; the culture of the US had changed enough over the decades and generations that it was allowed to happen. Broadly speaking (I'm not a political...
I'd put that in the realm of political revolution; the culture of the US had changed enough over the decades and generations that it was allowed to happen. Broadly speaking (I'm not a political scientist, someone smarter than me can probably put this into better words), culture shifts happen between generations, with big changes happening as older generations die out and newer ones come in. Politics follows culture, so as one generation comes in with their beliefs, whether they be more or less progressive than those before, things eventually change. These changes are often, well, generational as a result. I certainly don't think that the west's only way out of anti-surveillance laws is blowing people up or anything, but I also don't think it's something that will realistically change in the coming political cycles without a serious shake-up. And perhaps I'm just pessimistic but I don't see that happening any time soon. Governments around the world are welcoming the Chinese system of authoritarianism with open arms, and the public are broadly ambivalent, unable to see the steady shift, or supportive, seeing how it makes the lives of the woke liberals and trans people that much harder.
But I'll concede that perhaps superlatives like 'always' and 'never' might not be entirely accurate. The world is a big place, after all. But instead of 'never' I might say 'basically never, and if it does eventually happen, it'll only be a generation later'. On a practical lever, they may as well be the same though. Once I give up my privacy to a government, I'm not getting it back. My kids might, or maybe some huge government shakeup might grant it back. But me voting for a politician won't do it, and it's basically impossible to make most people give enough of a shit for something like that to vote specifically for it. 90% of people cast their vote exclusively for reasons of taxes, healthcare, or hatred. Anything beyond those is an afterthought for most, and they only remember what they've lost during the next election season when the politician's promises start coming out.
Oh come on, Germany! I thought you were one of the good guys in this context. If this ends up banning browser extension adblockers, would VPN adblocking be next?
Oh come on, Germany! I thought you were one of the good guys in this context. If this ends up banning browser extension adblockers, would VPN adblocking be next?
When a remote server generates packets with web content in them, the copyright to those packets obviously belongs to the author, such as a media company responsible for creating that content. Your...
When a remote server generates packets with web content in them, the copyright to those packets obviously belongs to the author, such as a media company responsible for creating that content. Your VPN is illegally modifying those packets by changing their headers and forwarding them to you, which is derivative work and illegal redistribution. You sound like a filthy criminal to me!
(This might be the stupidest legal argument about technology I've ever read about...)
I block ads/malware on the DNS level. If that is also copyright infringement, then it becomes even more insane, as they would then force people to connect to specific servers. In many cases, ad...
I block ads/malware on the DNS level. If that is also copyright infringement, then it becomes even more insane, as they would then force people to connect to specific servers. In many cases, ad and malware are interchangeable and come from the same network of ad servers, so basically also making firewalls copyright infringement.
Haha, I'm not surprised in the least. Germany is one of the most technologically backward countries of the EU. I'd be more worried if other countries started calling for this change.
Haha, I'm not surprised in the least. Germany is one of the most technologically backward countries of the EU. I'd be more worried if other countries started calling for this change.
How ridiculous. A browser must process the HTML/CSS provided in order to render it, and the way in which it does so is subject to variation, and in particular may be modified to the user’s preference. Should we say that when a website tries to use a feature which is deprecated, and the browser thus ignores the relevant code, the browser is performing an illegal modification to copyrighted code? Perhaps we should say that when a compiler optimises a program, it illegally modifies the source the code?
Of course, a court of law will never consider these things because they do not understand how technology works.
Obviously, changing the default font on your web browser violates so much copyright that we all should be in jail anyway.
Of all the arguments, copyright. Jeez.
I don't know how the German legal system works, but the US legal system is common law, meaning the law is heavily defined by precedent. This ruling passing here would have a lot of hugely damaging implications, all boiling down to the fact that you no longer own your computer.
If you have a record player and you buy a record, you can scratch that record up, modify it, do whatever you want to it and play it, as long as you're not distributing that modified record. This would do away with the equivalent for computers.
Anything that modifies the runtime behavior of an application would be made illegal by this. Antivirus applications, overlays, anti cheat software, password managers, hell, operating systems themselves.
The idea is really misguided. I own my computer. I should be the one who gets to make the final decision on what does and does not run on it, and how. You being a software developer doesn't give you the authority to decide what happens with my personal property.
The German legal system is notably not a common law system, but a civil law system. One of the principle differences is that German courts are not bound by the precedent of previous court decisions.
And that's not even illegal. As long as you're not making copies of that copy, you can sell that modified copy.
Yeah, people really trying to exploit the lack of understanding on how a computer works. You ask for data and are given data. You're not obligated to consume all data. This is the equivalent of saying that it's infringement to walk away from your TV during a commercial.
Or wear glasses while watching TV, thus modifying the image.
Dark theme plugin? Straight to jail!
The funny thing is, how would they even enforce such a ruling? How do you go about banning open source software from existence?
I assume that major browsers would comply by delisting adblockers from their official extension stores. That would be enough to prevent 99% of users from accessing them. They would probably have some legal means to also pursue the maintainers, or at least hosts of open source projects - GitHub would probably comply with lawful requests to take down or geo-restrict access to repositories.
This is often the issue: in principle these laws shouldn’t be enforceable, but often due to our reliance on particular gatekeepers, it is enough if the relevant government can convince that entity to comply with their requests.
A Lawsuit by Axel-Springer. The German FOX News, on it's way to making Germany a more and more backwards country. Depressing.
Fun Fact: The CEO of Axel Springer got a 1 Billion Euro gift by the widower of Axel Springer. He paid a total of 0€ in taxes on that, because he "didn't have money" to pay the tax. Because he bought 284 million Euro in shares of Axel Spinger SE.
You don't owe taxes in Germany if you don't have the money to pay them? That seems very easily exploitable.
https://www.juhn.com/fachwissen/erbschaftsteuer-schenkungsteuer/axel-springer-aktien-schenkung-steuerfrei/
here's a German lawyer breaking it down, if you translate it it will give you the full picture. But from what I understand it's very specific to gifts/inheritance. Here's a ChatGPT summary of that article ( I have checked that the statements are the same as in the legal article, but I would've struggled translating the legal jargon :D)
⸻
Key Mechanism
1. Prior Share Purchase
• Before the gift, Döpfner bought shares worth €276 million (4.1%) from the Friede Springer Stiftung.
• His overall stake rose to 6.9%.
• This purchase likely aimed to reduce his available wealth, making him eligible for a tax exemption.
2. Tax Law Basis
• § 13b ErbStG: Shares in a company with at least 25% shareholder participation can be treated as begünstigtes Vermögen (favored business assets).
• Friede Springer held 42.6% → condition met.
• Normally, only up to €26 million of such gifts can be partly tax-free (Verschonungsabschlag). Above ~€90 million, no relief applies.
3. § 28a ErbStG – Verschonungsbedarfsprüfung
• Provides full tax exemption for gifts over €26 million if:
• The transferred assets qualify as begünstigtes Vermögen.
• The recipient has no other available wealth to pay tax.
• Because Döpfner had just invested nearly all his liquid assets into buying more shares, his verfügbares Vermögen (available wealth) was effectively zero.
• Thus, he could apply for a full waiver of gift tax.
⸻
Absolutely absurd
Yeah, it's pretty nuts that shares aren't treated as wealth. Most billionaires in the US don't keep a lot of cash in their bank accounts, that would be a waste of money. Their assets are mostly tied up in shares, real estate, or other assets. Seems like an insanely easy way to get out of paying taxes.
You are absolutely taxed on shares when you receive them, at your regular income tax rate. Then you're taxed again on sale, for capital gains (unless they had no increase in value or lost value), at your regular income tax rate for short term sales or at a reduced 15% if you hold the shares for over a year.
The way wealthy people avoid taxes is by taking out long term loans (which are not taxable, for obvious reasons) with shares as collateral. They don't sell the shares, but still gain liquidity, and then when they die the creditor gets their payout and their wealth would have grown enough to eclipse the value of the loan anyway.
Most wealth is dynastic, hence the opposition to inheritance taxes. Someone paid taxes on income generations ago, but now it's grown to a bundle of assets with billions and gets passed on, and you can use loans to generate liquidity without touching the assets that keep growing in value.
Additional taxes on capital gains would just further fuck the professional class over, since RSUs and ESPPs can be a large part of workers' compensation.
This is not the case for normal taxes you owe, just in this specific case, where it’s a Gift (and I think inheritance)
Arguing that the way you locally display otherwise legally obtained data (e.g. a website you receive from a webserver) may constitute copyright infringement is absolutely insane... One can only hope the lawsuit gets dismissed once again. Otherwise we'll have to deal with some grim implications for all kinds of development activities, usage of all sorts of visualization tools, and so many other usecases. :S
I think that if this were to happen there is a good chance there would be an unforeseen mental shift that makes this backfire. Basically if ad blocking and piracy are both breaking the same rules in the same way then it's a lot easier to make the mental jump to not caring about copyright infringement at all.
Anecdotally the thing that caused me to pretty much stop caring about personal use copyright infringement was how difficult it has become to back up my own media that I paid for physical copies of. A sort of "if I'm going to be treated the same for doing things I should be allowed to then why am I even bothering with the harder path?"
Also every big tech company might just get away with pirating everything ever made (including porn) to train AI.
While this is from the US, I feel Germany isn't generally more generous. From Circular 33, emphasis mine.
I can't imagine a sane world where "arbitrary ad injected into page" would remotely qualify as a creative expression. HTML/CSS is templating. A way of arranging content, not content itself (mostly). Sure, you can make a sufficiently cretive template, and could be copywritten in that case, but I'm reasonably certain they're not creating art with their page layouts.
It really seems like we've been nosediving towards the cyberpunk ethos in recent months, just without the cool technology. The surveillance state is in and internet freedom is out, we'll watch our ads and brainrot and nothing else and we'll be happy. It's depressing as hell and I can't see a way out. It's all well and good to vote and contact representatives (things I do and tell my friends to do also) but the strategy seems to be pushing these anti-privacy laws over and over and over again until one day they inevitably succeed, moving the line further and further towards authoritarianism.
Once we give up a freedom to a government, we never, ever get it back without revolution, political or otherwise. Once a law is passed that, say, allows the government to backdoor any and all encryption, there is absolutely no way of convincing any future government to give up that power over us. So the strategy is to strip a little freedom away, wait until people stop caring, then strip another, and another, until they have everything. That's what all of this is. Porn bans, anti-encryption laws, adblock bans. Each thing is a small but permanent step toward authoritarianism. They only have to win once; we have to win every time.
How does your unidirectional theory of political change explain things like Margaret Sanger's victory over the Comstock Act?
I'd put that in the realm of political revolution; the culture of the US had changed enough over the decades and generations that it was allowed to happen. Broadly speaking (I'm not a political scientist, someone smarter than me can probably put this into better words), culture shifts happen between generations, with big changes happening as older generations die out and newer ones come in. Politics follows culture, so as one generation comes in with their beliefs, whether they be more or less progressive than those before, things eventually change. These changes are often, well, generational as a result. I certainly don't think that the west's only way out of anti-surveillance laws is blowing people up or anything, but I also don't think it's something that will realistically change in the coming political cycles without a serious shake-up. And perhaps I'm just pessimistic but I don't see that happening any time soon. Governments around the world are welcoming the Chinese system of authoritarianism with open arms, and the public are broadly ambivalent, unable to see the steady shift, or supportive, seeing how it makes the lives of the woke liberals and trans people that much harder.
But I'll concede that perhaps superlatives like 'always' and 'never' might not be entirely accurate. The world is a big place, after all. But instead of 'never' I might say 'basically never, and if it does eventually happen, it'll only be a generation later'. On a practical lever, they may as well be the same though. Once I give up my privacy to a government, I'm not getting it back. My kids might, or maybe some huge government shakeup might grant it back. But me voting for a politician won't do it, and it's basically impossible to make most people give enough of a shit for something like that to vote specifically for it. 90% of people cast their vote exclusively for reasons of taxes, healthcare, or hatred. Anything beyond those is an afterthought for most, and they only remember what they've lost during the next election season when the politician's promises start coming out.
Oh come on, Germany! I thought you were one of the good guys in this context. If this ends up banning browser extension adblockers, would VPN adblocking be next?
When a remote server generates packets with web content in them, the copyright to those packets obviously belongs to the author, such as a media company responsible for creating that content. Your VPN is illegally modifying those packets by changing their headers and forwarding them to you, which is derivative work and illegal redistribution. You sound like a filthy criminal to me!
(This might be the stupidest legal argument about technology I've ever read about...)
I block ads/malware on the DNS level. If that is also copyright infringement, then it becomes even more insane, as they would then force people to connect to specific servers. In many cases, ad and malware are interchangeable and come from the same network of ad servers, so basically also making firewalls copyright infringement.
Yeah, this would break all kinds of things.
Soon enough, ignoring the ads will be an attack against free speech, and not buying the products they advertise will be theft.
Wouldn’t that mean caller ID is also illegal? Everyone with a smartphone please line up at your local jail.
Haha, I'm not surprised in the least. Germany is one of the most technologically backward countries of the EU. I'd be more worried if other countries started calling for this change.