Comment by danpalmer
4 days ago
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising might mean they don't get paid for producing their content, but you are under no obligation in the absence of an agreement.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
Morally, it is piracy IMO. If you applied the rule universally, the site would go out of business and then there would be no video to see.
Google doesn't care about right and wrong, only what they can get away with. They don't deserve to be treated as a moral subject by you, because they will not reciprocate. You're free to be as shameless as they are in your interactions with them if you can get away with it, you're just playing the game at the same level as they are.
I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain utilitarian decision after they started hassling me with captchas and intimidations that someone at my IP address was using an ad blocker. So yeah, I'm paying protection money. But I don't feel in the least good about it.
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Many people used to go to the bathroom during commercial breaks while watching a movie on TV. Was that considered piracy? Was it immoral?
I find this argument fascinating overall!
I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)
Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?
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Is it piracy to pirate a pirate? Most of the content that I view on YT is old live concerts uploaded by fans. Did goog pay a license for those pirate recordings? Who should goog pay? The label? The pirate who uploaded? The OG pirate who recorded the show? So doesn’t this make them pirates too?
These are honest questions and it seems way too fuzzy to me to be making moral judgments about the whole mess.
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I didn't look at the billboards when I was driving today.
Did I just pirate my drive to work?
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No one if forcing them to use ads for revenue; they could choose to start charging directly for the content. Seems to be working ok for Netflix.
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I do apply the rule universally, they haven't gone out of business.
If they were unable to gain any revenue from advertising, they would go out of business if they could not find an alternative source of income.
I feel that they are more likely to find an alternative than go out of business. That alternative might not motivate people to make content that no-one wants and trick viewers into watching. If it were a system where the users being happy dictated their income perhaps the service might be better than a system where the happiness of advertisers defines how much they get
perhaps it should be out of business then? it captured its market share on an ad free model... it would not have gotten to this size with this model from the start.
if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?
In most cases of adblocking, that would be a good thing.
99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet, without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much less spam.
And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe sites for example.
Right, but objectively, ad blocking is equivalent in outcome to muting and looking away - you don't see the ad. And YouTube allows that. So, in my view, it's the same.
Similar reason to why DVR recording is not pirating.
All things supported by ads should go out of business. Ads are 100% morally wrong.
Kant isn't the sole authority on morality.
1. It's not piracy.
2. I don't care.
I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.
> 1. It's not piracy.
Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their opinions, that's not a discussion.
You don't seem to understand. Allow me to clarify. I'm not interested in winning some silly argument on Hacker News, I'm interested in using the internet without being spied on or paying out the ass. I just want all of the Very Good Boys and Girls who are doing unpaid public relations work for Google to understand why the rest of us don't care what they think.
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"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
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No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing.
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
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> the right to put an advert in front of you
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
I would prefer not to, so I don't.
> The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them.
Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
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Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
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Ad blockers are recommended by the FBI as safety measures. I follow the FBI's advice. Internet ads are a vector for executing untrusted code that can invoke exploits and engage in invasive fingerprinting. Revert back to the 90s web with dumb ads and I'll look at them. It's amazing how blinkered people will be about potentially malicious programs downloaded from the internet just because it's hidden behind a browser interface.
Forbes literally did this.
Guys, please disable your adblockers
People disable adblockers
Malware!
I can absolutely decide to reject with impunity any and all packets that my computer receives, no matter if I initialized the request. I have not made a sale by reading some other website content and have absolute authority to discriminate over which data is allowed or blocked. Ads have absolutely no higher authority or preference over other packets that would obligate my bandwidth, attention, or time.
> but ad blocking is definitely piracy
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.
Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
I will not be pretending that. I am _asserting_ it. I made no such agreement with YouTube. I am very confused why you think I did
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and magically, the sneakers are also still there.
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I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
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What deal? What contract?
I'm serious. Show me in the Youtube Terms of Service where it says that blocking ads is against the contract. I've looked. Carefully. There is no such language there.
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YouTube sends my browser a lot of data, a LOT of data. It's not my fault if some of that data doesn't make it to the screen, or if hardware on my network blocks certain DNS requests. No, I asked YouTube for a web page, and it sent one back to me. I'm not sure why everyone is so eager to let someone else dictate what code they run on their own machine. It's really strange.
> The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.
Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?
I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.
If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
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> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.
Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?
Just because you say it's piracy doesn't mean it is.
When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch the content, and pay for the internet connection and power to my house, only then will they have a claim to what commands are run on my computer.
But my computer, that I paid for, using the power and bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.
If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely free to not send me any content they don't want me to watch.
Some of us are old enough to remember televisions. It's not piracy to leave the room or turn the TV off while the ads are playing.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
Was it piracy to leave the room and make a snack during TV ads?
It's becomes piracy when you create a new distribution without ads... which you're doing with ad blockers.
That is not what distribution means.
I am allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.
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https://www.tivo.com/support/how-to/how-to-use-SkipMode
A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
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While this is not an unreasonable way one could define "piracy", surely you must be aware that your definition is significantly more expansive than the one in common use?
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The common use means violation of copyright, specifically distribution rights.
Payment is not a good indicator. Tons of free content has no payment, and a good chunk of pirate content is paid for.
I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
and they won't block you, because they understand that their dominance of this particular style of video content requires allowing everyone in.
Just use AdNausem (uBlock Origin mod) that clicks ALL THE ADDS. Problem solved! Wish more people used it, so the creators could again make money from ads.
No. Ad blocking is NOT piracy. It’s really that simple.
> "you're circumventing the method of paying for content"
Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of how much they used.
Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged the same as someone who watches 200 videos.
We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is not piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy shakedown.
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
> but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45177601
What you are describing is not piracy/Copyright infringement.
You can say that we should not be blocking those ads, that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised copies of the content.
lol, no it’s not pirating.