While consuming the content, you’re avoiding paying some content its price, because you protest how the content guards its commercial interests. Thus, ahoy!
You must log in or register to comment.
There is no law that says “you have to load the ads that are being served when you access a website” (yet).
It goes against the wishes of the content provider, but not against any rule they can legally enforce.
It also doesn’t even touch on copyright law.
Therefore, it’s not piracy.Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior, not piracy at all.
Unless you’re giving food and shelter to every Jehovah’s Witness that comes to your home, then you’re the insane one.
Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior
? I agree but that doesn’t make it not piracy. Are you implying piracy is not sane behavior?
if you’re arguing this, it’s probably already vanishingly rare for you to be clicking on ads or looking anything more than a glance at them. and on my work device, where i didn’t install adblockers as an experiment, i don’t recall ever seeing ads that ship malware, and i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device.
if by malware you mean how viewing ads slows down your machine, that what people say of Denuvo.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah’s witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
i don’t recall ever seeing ads that ship malware
It’s a very good business and it exists.
that what people say of Denuvo.
It’s good, because Denuvo and every DRM framework is malware too.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah’s witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
Since when is starving a requirement to accept harassment from every company out there? On my own computer nonetheless. It’s basic protection. I don’t install viruses because you ask for it.
i’m not asking you to accept harassment, i’m not saying piracy is bad. i’m just saying that ad-blocking is one form of piracy, just like how people pirate to reject DRM. and it surprises me that so many people insist it’s not.
i don’t understand why i would host a solicitor or how that is comparable to ads. when you see a solicitor you don’t pay them bread and jam, their company does. when you see an ad you don’t pay the website money, the ad company does.
Ads is a form of psychological harassment for many reasons.
when you see a solicitor you don’t pay them bread and jam, their company does
Cult members are often not paid by their cults. You should give them your money then.
so is DRM.
money isn’t what cult members want when they volunteer to evangelize. that’s different from webmasters and ads.
don’t recall ever seeing ads that ship malware
How old are you?
i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device
That might be because your work device is protected by policies and applications installed by syssec team.
Imagine them getting teleported back to the days of Limewire’s mp3.exes, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, audio ads, moving ads, activex bullshit, drive-by malware not even needing interaction, and…
BonziBuddy too, can’t forget that. It’s so cute, it can’t be malicious! I’m going to install it on all my office computers, what’s the harm?
curiously, the only time i’ve ever gotten infected (besides wannacry) was through a torrent
You don’t have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.
It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.
The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?
Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.
If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I’m financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.
Full stop.
A lot of ads are given permission to run unvetted, arbitrary code in your browser.
Every modern browser is supposed to sandbox that shit, but all they need is one security exploit to escape that sandbox and potentially be executing arbitrary code on your computer with full access to all of your files.
Some malicious ads can potentially infect/hijack your computer without you clicking on them at all.
these are as rare as non-tracking ads, and my approaches of<1. i don’t use my web browser much on mobile (that distance probably fries my eyes anyways) 2. i use µBO and whitelist sites on my normal computer>probably help me avoid that anyways
These are rare ads for you, because you’re not in the target demographic that they get shown to.
Everyone’s online experience can be totally different based on what group an algorithm puts you in.
Ads were a big source of malware around 2000.
I think you got the piracy part backwards. The ad companies are the thieves. Their ads ship with trackers that steal the consumer private information. It’s an invasion on privacy and it’s a security threat. I blog and don’t implement any ads to protect my readers
Ads are egregious attempts at brainwashing you into buying something. Blocking ads is morally correct. If something relies on ads, then its business model is broken.
piracy implies you a stealing with out paying. when they offer it for free its not stealing, they have every right to have ads to pay for thier sites, but people have right to block things that could affect the computer.
Piracy is not stealing/theft. That is a corporate lie.
i agree; you’re making copies: not displacing any original inventory
The deal is between the person paying for the ad and the person displaying the ad.
I wasn’t ever involved in the deal, I owe them nothing.
I think this is the only reply that hits the mark. Most of the others are mentioning malware, the morals of adverts or how obnoxious they are. To steal implies to take without payment, but the payment is not from the viewer, it is from the advertiser,who is paying.
I’d argue that blocking is more similar to taking a restroom break when a commercial is shown on the TV. No reasonable person would say that that’s stealing.
Yep. I don’t recall signing any contract…
What about services where you pay but still get ads? Netflix? Cable?
In UK people pay for TV if they have one. In Germany people pay for TV, Radio even if they have one. Does it stop ads? Nope! Except you can’t block them on radio wave level unfortunately. At least on the web you can.
That makes the piracy a lot more ethical and probably something I support.
Working to avoid the excesses of surveillance capitalism isn’t piracy, it’s self-defense.
isn’t piracy, it’s self-defense
It can be both. What’s wrong with a little piracy in self-defense?
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
Ads flooding a page with garbage making it more difficult to read is absolutely a service problem. As is having to pay a subscription fee to a news outlet you may only check once a month.
Offer me a service where I pay per article read, a similar price to the ad revenue per article, and we can talk.
Time is our most precious resource and advertisers are here to waste it. I have no qualms telling them to fuck off.
i do block ads because they waste my time. that’s still piracy, and there’s a bajillion ethical reasons to commit piracy
Arr, batten down the hatches and hoist ye sails, matey. It’s time for some pirating!
When I ride my ad-subventioned subway and I look away from the ads, am I free riding the sub?
no, and neither is looking away from internet ads. blocking on the other hand stops the ad company from paying
Whiche eventually stops the content from being free. Have you any idea how expensive video server hosting is ? YouTube hosts billions of hours of videos and makes them available to the public, and does all of that entirely for free.
If you think they would have even the shadow of a glimmer of hope of funding that entirely with unobtrusive banner ads, then frankly you’re deluded.
You can have ad free content or free content. You can’t have both, that’s not how shit works. And if you’re willing to pay for ad free content, that is already an option with Patreon, Nebula or YT Premium.
Guess telling people the truth hurts.
That’s not unpopular, that’s simply incorrect. No law bans me from blocking ads.
I don’t HATE hate ads. When watching Twitch, sure I get an ad every 15 minutes I think. But the fact that there is technology for ANYONE in the world to see someone’s computer screen in almost real time, have a chat room, and (almost) for free (well, for $0. I pay with my time watching ads)
But seeing the SAME AD, EVERY TIME, makes it annoying. I don’t know why Twitch thinks I will watch FNAF 2, but seeing the ad 10 times will not convince me to watch it.
Change it up. Make me go “oh, what’s this ad about” not “oh NOT THIS AGAIN”. That is a gaurenteed walk away for a water break.
Is it any different from when we used to record our shows and fast-forward through the ads?
My family always used to mute ads on the TV when I was growing up.
I guess that’s piracy too, eh?
If you are in the UK I think you need a license to do that.
to watch BBC, not mute ads, no?
It does not have anything to do with sea so it’s not piracy, nor is it copying without license. You aren’t in a contract with people that show you ads, there is no legal requirement to do it. I don’t care about their commercial interests but care a whole lot about my time and interests, I feel no obligation to do it, nor care if some ad-supported thing will stop existing. Like fuck them lol.
i value social contracts over law, and especially for small websites, when their advertising is unintrusive i think i should help them survive and keep running. a ton of major things i use like great independent news sources and some hosters of pirated content use ads while i don’t have a membership.
by analogy, maybe piracy doesn’t reduce indie devs’ revenues that much as it provides word-of-mouth. but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for them.
Understandable position and truly unpopular. My opinion is - ads are the raison d’être of surveillance capitalism of today and they often exploit our psyche in a ways that border on mind control, so minimizing my exposure to them doesn’t break social contract, and most people don’t block ads not because they think that it harms someone but because they don’t know that it’s possible.
most people don’t block ads not because they think that it harms someone but because they don’t know that it’s possible.
I agree.
It isn’t in any way piracy. I am under no obligation to pay attention to ads.
Or give them access to my network or my compute.
not paying attention to ads is very different from blocking the ads
Not to me.
but to the website’s wallet
If they didn’t track me and spy on me I wouldn’t have a problem. But they track me and spy on me so they have to go. That isn’t piracy. Its not getting ripped off. When there are no definitive laws or rules then I can’t break them.
If one of the pirate parties succeeded in implementing their platform, I’d still call the act piracy there.
Okay. Its clear you have a vested interest in it being wrong. Its not and its not illegal.
by “the act” I meant things that are more popularly understood as piracy. even if torrenting cracked Assassin’s Creed was legalized, I’d still call torrenting cracked video games piracy.
