Yeah, the linked article is very shallow. Heise [0] goes a bit more into detail, sadly the actual ruling isn't available yet.
Quick Summary from the Heise article: Axel Springer tried to claim that the website itself is a copyrighted work and therefore an adblocker would not be allowed to modify it. However the court decided:
1) Removing elements (ads) from being displayed does not modify the originally transferred HTML, but only the data structures as generated by the browser, which is allowed to be modified by the user. Otherwise using a browser without images would also be in breach of copyright.
2) The website in itself is not a copyrighted work, as there's no original creative effort involved in generating the HTML.
Most of the prior GPL cases ruled on (including the one you linked) were about redistribution of modified works without providing source and about who actually has standing to sue regarding GPL violations.
This case however brings two new (as far as I'm aware) questions to the table:
- Whether the permanent license revocation clause holds up
- Whether the neural networks is considered a part of the covered work (and must therefore be provided in "source" form, rather than just a trained network)
The second one is especially interesting, since the court will likely have to go into how far the GPLs coverage extends into other parts of a covered work.
Your account is unable to access _any_ private repository after being flagged as being from a sanctioned country. That's regardless of where you're actually accessing your account from.
While you could create a new account, you still couldn't grant that new account access (since you can no longer access private repositories from your primary account). Also a new account still runs the risk of getting flagged if you accidentally access the account without a VPN enabled just once.
Screen captures aren't too common since they would incur an additional re-encoding step (losing a minor bit of fidelity), so for the more "professional" rippers it isn't a proper option. Instead they use the raw data stream from the streaming platform, strip the DRM and reassemble the video file. Of course the DRM stripping is the hard part with not much public knowledge being available.
As you mentioned, the quality of those rips is a bit worse than a blu-ray rip, but if the blu-ray isn't available there's not much you can do. People will just enjoy a slightly worse quality version (just like they did with shaky cam rips).
Quick Summary from the Heise article: Axel Springer tried to claim that the website itself is a copyrighted work and therefore an adblocker would not be allowed to modify it. However the court decided:
1) Removing elements (ads) from being displayed does not modify the originally transferred HTML, but only the data structures as generated by the browser, which is allowed to be modified by the user. Otherwise using a browser without images would also be in breach of copyright.
2) The website in itself is not a copyrighted work, as there's no original creative effort involved in generating the HTML.
[0] (in German) https://www.heise.de/news/Landgericht-Hamburg-Adblocker-vers...