>A direct analogy here would seem to be a newspaper publisher arguing that if a reader chooses to fold up the newspaper into an origami duck,

No, that type of manipulation isn't the legal argument Axel Springer is trying to use. It has nothing to do with re-using newspapers/books as birdcage liner, or fireplace kindling, etc.

Instead, Axel is focusing on the manipulation of the text/bytes itself (i.e. the HTML rewrite). A better direct analogy would be the lawsuits against devices deleting ads or muting "bad words" from tv broadcasts and movies. E.g.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/child-safe-viewing-a

That's the legal angle they used to pressure ReplayTV to remove the automatic Commercial Skip feature from their DVR.

And yes, sometimes us nerds really want to slippery-slope those lawsuits into wild scenarios such as ... "But doesn't that also mean that when I shut my eyes at a tv commercial during a baseball game or go the bathroom during an ad it's a copyright violation?!?" .... No, the courts don't see it as the same thing.

Probably the more convincing analogy to justify ruling against Axel is the more prosaic "Reader Mode" in browsers that analyze HTML and rewrite it. Is Apple Safari Reader Mode a "copyright violation" ?!? I hope not.

If I have a volunteer service where people ask me to come after the paperboy and individually redact all the ads in the newspaper with a marker, am I breaking the same law?

I wonder if it has different implications for different types of adblocking, then. A DNS-level block doesn't modify any copyrighted data, unless they're contending that the addresses returned by DNS servers are copyrighted. And that would seem to potentially pose major hurdles for the functionality of the internet.

I also wonder how it's made distinct from an addon that does something like block malware on a website. Surely that must be modifying copyrighted data too? Are some modifications allowed, I guess? Surely if something like an accessibility addon modifies the data, that's acceptable, right?

What if I have a friend who volunteers to take a black sharpie to my newspapers and remove all the ads and content I've told them in advance that I don't like, before I read the paper? And that friend lives in the computer?

But the decision as written (or rather, as translated; I'm not fluent in German) would seem to make modifications to web page from the browser's inspection console illegal as well.

a cosmic bit flip could manipulate bytes on a computer...