> Firmly, without reservation: if you deliver to me content A, I am under NO OBLIGATION to actually consume content B, merely because you included it in the same package.

The legal view here seems to be that a third party removed content B while delivering content A, and therefore violated the copyright of the provided work.

It's not even framed as redistribution of copyrighted works, it's violating the "exclusive right of modification available under § 69c"

I'm curious how this will play out.

The only content you're interested in is content A, and the supplier chose a business model which requires you to consume content B against your will. Now they sued a third party which is stripping content B as a service to you.

I believe a case needs to be made that content B is not part of the original work provided.

Not easy though...

It may be substantially simpler to acknowledge that there is no binding contract involved between me and the supplier of content B. Were this some sort of purchase or legal arrangement that I had consented to in some way, then the content provider would have a much stronger case.

In practice, I arrive at any given site with nothing more than a crude hyperlink and almost no description of the contents. (Maybe I have a search page summary, often I don't. If I do it's usually rather out of date and incomplete.) I cannot trivially know whether content B is present, or what sort of agreement I may or may not be entering into, until data is actually transferred to my device. By that point, I typically already have content B, before I could possibly make an informed choice about whether I wanted to spend my bandwidth downloading it, what cost it may represent, etc.

Technological solutions already exist here. A provider can choose to lock content behind a paywall, communicating an actual cost, and require that I pay it. Providers can also usually quite trivially detect ad blocking technology, and require that I disable it before delivering the content. (At that point, I am making an informed choice!) A provider doing neither of these things has a very weak case imho. I suppose we'll see if the courts agree.

>I believe a case needs to be made that content B is not part of the original work provided.

>Not easy though...

IANAL, and definitely not eine Rechtsanwalt.

That said, assuming that digital ads work the same way in Germany as they do elsewhere, such ads are tacked on to the site after an auction that takes place moments before that ad is displayed.

Given that the "copyright holder" of the site doesn't even know what ad will be displayed and, in point of fact, will likely never know which ads will be displayed to which individuals viewing their website, how is their "expression" being thwarted?

Given that simple truth, the only "expressive" claim that the copyright holder could make would be that "there should be an ad of some sort here."

If that's actually the case, just having a box where the ad would be that says "this is a space for advertisements" should be enough to satisfy "violations" of the copyright owner's "expression."