It's true that it's at time conflicting, it's not true that it's meant to be so.

The term of art for this is "legal certainty" and finding the inconsistencies help iron out when something is off.

So yes, it does matter how logically an ad block is equivalent to bookmarklets, because inconsistencies crack and consistency composes.

I get your point that judges can rule, but it's not the end all be all of it.

>If elected judges determine it's illegal, none of these "nerd" defenses will work.

The nerd defense of "I will use technology to avoid being caught" does work, and it's the only nerd defense worth pursuing.

> elected judges

Judges are not elected, in Germany at least. They are appointed.

Law is the recorded decisions of those with power. There are ways other than legislation to create law that we're only just beginning to explore.

IIRC there has been a case in Germany where it was ruled that opening devtools is hacking and therefore illegal intend. A person found a vulnerability by looking at the website source (using devtools) and informed the company. They then sued him using the "Hackerparagraph" (§ 202c StGB) for use of hacker tools.

This varies from country to country.

In the United States, it's legal to modify your machine to interpret the programs running on it other than the way intended by the machine creator and the program author (Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc, 1992). But every nation has its own system of laws and the precedents of one aren't binding on another (and I don't, personally, know if the Galoob v. Nintendo precedent extends to modifying the data on a PC or only protects the far-more-complicated approach of intermediating between PC storage and the CPU).

To my perception, the position of mods in the gaming ecosystem is mostly, for want of a better term, a "gentleman's agreement" or "gentleman's understanding." An awful lot of game devs got started by modding other games, and they feel more than zero empathy for the folks who are basically learning to be the next generation of developers, if not future employees. It's a bit akin to Adobe's position on cracked copies of Photoshop: they reserve the right to sue so companies can't just thumb their nose at their IP rights and use their product with no remuneration, but individual non-corporate users of pirated copies are, at worst, unpaid advertising for the product and, at best, future customers. Some game dev houses are exempt from this "empathy rule;" Nintendo is famously litigious (although even then, they tend to target projects that are, whether the developer knows it or not, in direct competition with Nintendo; AM2R puttered along happily for years until Nintendo decided to release their own Metroid 2 remake).

Really! But what's the legal argument there? Nothing is copied, it's a mod.