Two German web publishers have lost a legal battle against the maker of the ad blocking software Adblock Plus in a court in Hamburg.
Zeit Online and Handelsblatt, owned by the newspapers Die Zeit and Handelsblatt, sued the software company Eyeo, which is based in Germany, claiming it was was anti-competitive and should not be able to prevent users seeing ads on their news sites.
Eyeo is facing three other court cases launched by German publishers, including the country’s largest, Axel Springer.
Adblock Plus is especially controversial because it allows publishers who follow its guidelines on advertising to pay a fee to be “whitelisted”, allowing their ads to get through to Adblock users. The company says it wants to work with publishers to develop better, less intrusive advertising.
The software has been downloaded more than 400m times and was being used on at least 50m browsers as of June last year.
A statement from Eyeo said the company was extremely happy with the court’s decision.
A company spokesman, Ben Williams, added: “We understand our software is disruptive, but we look at synonyms and the first one that comes to my mind is innovative. It’s really about giving users the right I think they all have to determine what appears on their screen.”
• This article was amended on 27 April 2015 to clarify the number of Adblock users
