Advertising company removes domain from blocklist under US copyright invocation

EasyList’s blacklist, which blocks advertisers’ trackers and domains in ad blockers, has removed an advertiser’s domain through an invocation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The domain functionalclam.com has been removed from the list, according to a statement from an EasyList administrator on Github, through a takedown procedure based on US copyright law. The administrator was forced to do this in order not to endanger EasyList as a whole. The domain no longer appears in the list. This means that adblockers will no longer block this specific domain, even if the adblocker is on.

Admiral company says it is responsible for the removal request. This company helps companies increase their ad revenue and says that fighting ad blockers is one of its core tasks. It claims that the domain in question is not an ad server, but is part of an access control platform.

This is a takedown procedure based on the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The practice of EasyList is problematic in light of this law, Admiral says, because it could fall under the circumvention of technological measures that can be used to limit or prevent access to a work, i.e. access controls. That is prohibited by US law.

The adblocker Adguard argues that this may set an important precedent, with an ad company using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to circumvent adblockers. The American civil rights organization EFF has made an appeal to the relevant administrator of EasyList to get in touch. The administrator writes in his message that if the server is not an ad server, but an ‘adblock warning’ server, it could have been removed without a DMCA takedown request. As a result, the precise nature of the domain seems to be the deciding factor here.