
Adblock plus served with takedown order - pjc50
https://adblockplus.org/blog/smells-like-censorship-big-brother
======
Arnt
Wrote Clay Shirky: "Monetizing two per cent of your audience is the easy part,
doing without 98 per cent of your advertising is the hard part". Bild is
discovering the latter part, and for a paper with a long history of bullying
it's a difficult lesson.

At worst, APB can block bild.de if the maintainers are beaten up in court. No
law against that, and if the tiff between Bild and Google is any history, most
of Bild's audience will forget Bild and just go to Tagesschau or something.

Poor Bild. It must be hard to be a tabloid and have to sell yourself every day
to customers who don't really care.

------
SNvD7vEJ
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Xb-
buT...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Xb-
buTsVLoJ:https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D2%26t%3D41068+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=se)

~~~
jlgaddis
As _pascalmemories_ noted, this cached version is "post-takedown" as evidenced
by "[Redacted]" in the second posting along with the explicit notice "Filters
deleted due to a court injunction we received today."

While I didn't see the filters "pre-takedown", a Google search for the URL [0]
turns up a number of other places where it was referenced. While I can't
verify that they did/do work, at least a few of those results appear to
contain filters to defeat the anti-ad-blocking mechanisms put in place by
bild.de. (I'm intentionally not reproducing them here in an effort to perhaps
save _dang_ from having to respond to a takedown notice.) :/

[0]:
[https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41068](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41068)

------
ddrum001
A little passive aggressive (better than the legally aggressive approach of
Axel), but pretty interesting. Not sure if I would qualify the eschewing of an
AdBlock work-around as Big Brother, but the legal precedent is worth
discussing.

------
vikaveri
Now, when you visit bild.de with AdBlock and NoScript...

------
jlgaddis
Streisand effect in 5... 4... 3...

~~~
Arnt
I doubt it. Bild just isn't what it was. They tried another fight like this
last year, were ignored, and caved in after two weeks, claiming the whole
exercise was just an data-gathering experiment.

Well, the data was gathered: When Bild grandstands and demands more income,
the newspaper loses a majority of its audience.

IMNSHO Bild hasn't gotten used to being too small to bully. Bild isn't
Streisand-class any more. On the web it's just another web site, too small to
rouse much emotion.

~~~
jlgaddis
I don't think their size is too relevant, in this case. It was noticed by the
tech community, at least, and the first thing I did was search out the code so
that I could duplicate it -- and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks
like that.

