Could AdBlocking be considered a form of piracy? If not, why?

[Dom]

In a regular setting, a person has to pay for the content in order to watch it (=gain access to it).
They may buy a DVD, rent a movie from the internet or get a Netflix subscription for instance.

Alternatively, this payment to gain access to the content could also be in a form of watching an advertisement. The content creator gets compensated as well as the company/provider that delivers this content to the viewer gets compensated too.

With AdBlocking, the payment process is completely skipped and the user gains an immediate, free access to this content. It could be argued that the copyright holder has set a precondition to gain the access to their copyrighted intellectual property, in a similar fashion someone selling a movie has set one (to buy it with money). By skipping this precondition and payment, could this be considered piracy?

If not, where would you draw the fundamental difference?
I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I'm not suggesting it is/isn't piracy, this is just philosophical pondering.

[Sir Seanicus, Esq.]

lol
lmao

Ads are piracy of my time and potentially dangerous/scams.

[Netaris]

Are ads containing viruses an attack from the maker of the ad ? If yes, should I consider them as hostile entities trying to contaminate my equipment ? You can ask that kind of questions both ways. There was also a lot of abuses with ads, starting by the TV. There is way too much of it and it's also the part of the economy that create the more polution, as it build the very desire to buy the things they make ads for. From my point of view, skipping ads is both for security measures and ecology.

[Mad Scientist]

Absolutely not.
Let's use YT for an example, using mobile devices theres ads sometimes every minute or less, or even 10-15 second ads for videos 9 seconds or shorter (shorts), that's just a blatant nuisance AND they play ads after the video is over, which is sneaky.

Overall, if you rely solely on ads and pestering users with ads in order to offset costs, you're definitely doing it wrong.

As for other sites, trying to hide pages behind annoying popups to require making an account to continue scrolling or seeing something, nuisance - gone. ABlockers being able to remove entire chunks of a page and the scripts from even loading, including "anti-adblock" scripts is a blessing. If anything people trying to fight adblockers is causing a huge rise of it, such as when yt/google tried (and are still trying) including adding scripts/code to target non google users & adblock users with intentional delays or slowdowns, which most likely is illegal in some areas or will be in others.

Ever seen some random YTer show a video of a website, and 80% of it is a big adfest? Yeah, looks way more professional without the garbage thrown all over the website, without annoying popups or other nuisance-to-purchase attempts. Much less random network and processing waste.

Цитата допису Maria:

If Google considers ad blockers as a form of piracy what about the data they 'pirate' from all of us?

You've likely experienced instances where you search for products on Google, only to see related ads on YouTube, Facebook, or other social media apps right after.

No matter the cost of YouTube Premium (regional pricing), it can't match the value of the personal data Google collects and sells to advertisers all this time. :momozzz:

When you use an adblocker and pay attention, you'll see a lot of pages infected with google, facebook, and amazon tracking. I usually block almost everything unless the page stops working without it.

[St✩rlight]

No, then you're gonna argue it's piracy to not sit an watch the commercial break when you're watching TV, or skip the full page ads in magazines and newspapers.

[eram]

adverts are free so no

[Not Big Surprise]

Цитата допису Munithe EXT:

No, then you're gonna argue it's piracy to not sit an watch the commercial break when you're watching TV, or skip the full page ads in magazines and newspapers.

flashbacks to that patent for a tv that detects if you're watching the ads or not

[kilésengati]

Linus "I consider unionisation a personal failure" Sebastian, known for Linus Tech Tips, says so:

https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1486925588199718912
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymmbZzjq6tQ

[LQIM]

Piracy necessitates unauthorized copying, redistribution, or sale of a copyrighted work. If I'm not mirroring the site myself, I'm not pirating it

If you mean any intellectual property theft at all, then there is still nothing. There is no contract, social or otherwise, between site admins and users that binds users to viewing ads. There has been no court cases about adblocking in America, and in the few overseas cases the courts have ruled in favor of the adblocker[www.theregister.com]

There is no expectation that someone who views your site will even be capable of viewing ads, so how could you possibly believe there's a social contract that users deal with ads to maintain a site? You can't, unless you're woefully uninformed

Also intellectual property as a concept is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid but that's an entirely different discussion so I will refrain from ranting any longer

[Sir Dookface McFerretballs]

Цитата допису Dom:

Could AdBlocking be considered a form of piracy? If not, why?.

No.

It's akin to someone saying "I don't want to watch this movie someone is trying to force me to watch, so I will block it."

You can't pirate something you don't want to interact with or see in the first place.

There's no way for you to make this out to be "piracy" without seeming pretentious and annoying.

If advertisers wanted us to watch ads, they should pay us to!

[Sir Seanicus, Esq.]

WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CORPORATIONS!!1!11!!

[Hammer Of Evil]

not piracy.

it's my pc. my power bill, my internet connection that i'm already paying for.

if someone wants assured revenue on their website, they make it a paid service, members only, or w/e.

not to mention there is zero control over if the advertiser sends malware. most of the internet advertisers have no restrictions, governance, codes or standards to adhere to, and no one to answer to.

I think all that happens to a bad advertiser is people will just stop visiting where they show up, and after they change methods they can be right back out there the next second.

[Yzal]

My PC? bought the parts and built it myself.
The electricity making it run? i'm paying for that.
The internet access to post this? i'm paying my ISP for it.

Why should i let someone else run their ads on my pc when not only it doesn't benefit me, but it makes the experience worse and less secure?

[Crashed]

Цитата допису lankaras:

This is a very strange take. Although to be fair, a lot of legal stuff is weird for online and digital.

There is no payment process, they just try to show you something and they get money for it if they do. And you have it set up so that they can't. Although you can also set it up so that it will still load but hidden.

The anti-adblock company Admiral claims it is a form of circumvention even though all an adblocker does is prevents content it considers objectionable from being loaded, displayed, or executed.

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

Цитата допису Dom:

Could AdBlocking be considered a form of piracy? If not, why?
...
I'm not suggesting it is/isn't piracy, this is just philosophical pondering.

We've had this topic before & I've posted some of my thoughts on it before :
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/6367585249991703577/#c6367585249991952888

While LinusTechTips' channel, which got hijacked, did not get hijacked via a malicious ad or the subsequent effects of a malicious ad, it's easy to see how his channel got hijacked when he implements company policies like "adblockers are not allowed on work machines" while not ALSO forbidding use of sites that have excessive & uncurated ads on company computers.

For a long time, even Google Adsense (arguably one of the most filtered ad services available but not the only ad-provider) has had a problem with ads getting through with VERY adult content, despite this being in violation of Adsense's terms, very violent content, and worst of all, malware.

Companies have had a long time to fix this and they just don't bother, in fact they get more and more invasive & bloated with their ads, to the point that you get several video ads on the same page that are literally heating up and sometimes damaging the average person's computer because they think they need to use all of your system resources to show you an endless stream of looping ads in multiple places on a page. ...and then the advertisers, and frankly their shills too, have the gall to say that YOU are the one in the wrong for blocking ads globally when they will take up ALL of your system resources to run their ads, without getting consent from you to use up that much system resources instead of just using PHP to deliver some basic image-ads.

You can go to a site that delivers text articles, & is not a video-sharing service, and instead of getting text and image-ads, you get at least 3 video ads playing at the same time. There isn't even implied consent given by the reader for 3 videos to run simultaneously when the site that they're reading is inherently a site that serves only text-based news articles. If you go to a site that delivers only text and images in their native content, then the advertisements should also be only text and images. If the advertisers are going to have no respect for the average person, then why should the average person have any respect for them?

---

Some people have been patient with advertisers and even tried the whole "non-intrustive advertising exception" thing, yet still been demonized for taking basic security precautions. ...and it IS a security precaution to block ads.

Some ad-feeds download malware directly into one's browser or computer to deliver its payload immediately, no tricking the user into running an installer required - and the reason they're able to do this is because most ads are not "just an ad". They're delivering and running programs on your computer, automatically, and will falsely claim that you're using an adblocker when sometimes all you're using is a basic script-blocker like NoScript!
NoScript doesn't block ads... it blocks CROSS-SITE SCRIPTING.

...again, you can run an advertisement feed via PHP to deliver text, still-images, and GIFs, none of which require ANY XSS, yet advertisers choose XSS as their primary means of advertisement delivery.
You can deliever text, image, & GIF ads that are safe via a system like PHP but advertisers insist on delivering script-based ads and fully functioning programs as ads, thus turning advertisement feeds into straight up cross-site scripting (XSS) vectors, that are just perfectly ripe for malicious attackers to take advantage of!

[Fiona the Gamer]

That's a good question, Ad blocks are not considered a piracy but as an essential tools to keep you safe from the internet, like browsing the internet without those excessive ads that take up half of the space or pops up at the middle of the video, like Youtube.

Now they have an anti-adblocker added to thire site, witch is annoying. It's not okay, it's like saying it's okay to have malwares, trojans and other malicious things that can really mess up your device. This is why I went to Odeysee and leave Youtube behind.

Anti-adblockers should be illegal, for allowing intrusive ads, annoyance and ads that are potentially harmful to the device that is in used.