World of Warcraft's Terms of Use prohibited bots. The court found that users who used the Glider bot with WoW were violating the Terms of Use and therefore were not licensed to use WoW in that way. Because users running WoW must copy its content from their hard drives to RAM to run it, the court found that using Glider with WoW constituted copyright infringement.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
It's a very interesting finding. The appeals court actually did reverse parts of the decision, including the hard-drive-to-RAM argument, ending up in favor of MDY for many of the claims!
But the devil is in the details. Even though MDY wasn't found to be infringing copyright by breaking the covenants of the license agreement against botting (simply copying static code to RAM was not considered sufficient "reproduction" to be infringement)... it was found to violate the DMCA because it was circumventing Blizzard's Warden framework designed to protect access to dynamic server-side materials. MDY therefore had the lower court's "permanent injunction" against doing so upheld.
So if you were to create an ad-blocker detector that detected all current ad-blockers, and required that detector to digitally sign a request for dynamic content, but then someone circumvented that detection by subsequently creating an ad blocker that wasn't detected, would it fall under this precedent and violate the DMCA?
And there's also fuzziness around whether MDY was tortiously interfering ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference ) with Blizzard's contracts with its subscribers. In this case, it wasn't, because MDY arguably was behaving as a good steward here. For instance, the opinion cites how MDY "enhances some players' experience of the game, including players who might not otherwise play WoW at all." One could see an argument that an ad blocker would encourage more visitors... but if there's no other revenue source other than ads, does the pendulum swing in the opposite direction in favor of the content creator?
Very difficult to tell. Just because Adblock Plus avoided a lawsuit in Germany, and (as the research paper from the OP http://randomwalker.info/publications/ad-blocking-framework-... points out) most ad embeddings today are "trivial" overlays that wouldn't be considered DRM per the DMCA, that doesn't mean that advertisers won't evolve another piece of ammunition in this war.
(I am not a lawyer; the above is not legal advice.)
You might have missed your calling.
That's that hacking tool, right? I think I saw it in the Matrix. It's used by nmap.
Forbes in this case seems to be able to control it to a certain degree anyways.
The law is so vague everyone technically commits a felony every time they load a web page. Did ycombinator give you explicit permission to use this server? No, they did not. If they want you punished for posting this and they can find a friendly district attorney, you're screwed.
I'm old enough to remember when the conventional wisdom was that sharing music on the internet wasn't stealing because nobody was being deprived of physical media. Give Google a few years to lobby and create PSAs and people will being going to jail for creating ad blockers.
As such, publicly accessible websites are, in effect, no less common areas than storefronts.
Of course, there's a way around this; websites could establish 'membership requirements' such as using a browser that does not have an ad blocker enabled; the content for most of the website would require being a member and volunteering to abide by membership rules to access. Violate those rules, and you would risk losing your membership and access to the content, though I seriously doubt grounds could be established for a lawsuit over it.
Did your local supermarket give you explicit permission to walk on to their premises to go shopping? No - they gave you implied licence to enter their premises which is made obvious by the circumstances.
Similarly, a court would almost certainly find that having a web server which is obviously intended to be publicly accessible would result in an implied licence for use of copyrighted material on the site for typical, expected usage of said site.
I look forward to seeing that battle play out.