181–190 of 299 posts
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...you consider private websites to be public areas?
If I can get to it without passing through a gate (login) then yes, it is a public area. Content creators should put up a wall and gate (require someone to pay money to view the content) if they want their content to not be public.
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> I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads. In addition to the counterarguments you've already received, I'd also like to note that the quote above is simply your personal opinion. Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify…
> Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify how their content is consumed, none of which are absolute and most of which vary wildly between different jurisdictions. Not really. What's limited is not content creators ability to specify consumption, but rather the assumption of the ability of the counter-party to understand and agree to the terms. There are some genuine content restrictions,…
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In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. The societally agreed upon principles, that constitute the law, place no responsibility on the receiver of free content (an easily justifiable principle in fact). They have all the right and power to refuse to give their content away for free. You ha…
> In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. This does seem to be the crux of our disagreement. You think that offering up your content merely represents a non-binding expectation. In other domains, we don't take that position. If I weave you a scarf, and I say "Hey, i'll give you this scarf…
On the web, we have a way to handle the exact equivalent to your scenario. We do that by ensuring the user agrees to go to the store before handing them over a scarf. For instance, on the protocol level, you could reject all GET requests that do not have attached the proof of acceptance of the cough medicine quest. The rejection message (e.g. 403 Forbidden) would contain a machine-interpretable requirement of the quest. That synergizes well with the legal level - faking proof of quest acceptance would (AFAIK) constitute unauthorized access to scarf under CFAA. At the same time, the valid proof could match the legal definition of informed consent. It also meshes well with the social level, as whoever reads the 403 response (e.g. in their browser) would see the need to consent to the quest in order to get the scarf. Consenting to the quest, taking the scarf, and then not doing the quest would rightfully classify me as a thief and an asshole.
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Do you mean ReplayTV? I owned a Tivo at some point but replayTV was great because it auto-detected ads and had an option (or default behavior?) of skipping them automatically. Tivo you had to manually push 30 second skip 6 times.
I think the original TiVo's had this "auto-skip" feature but had to be removed due to this issue.
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In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. The societally agreed upon principles, that constitute the law, place no responsibility on the receiver of free content (an easily justifiable principle in fact). They have all the right and power to refuse to give their content away for free. You ha…
> In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. This does seem to be the crux of our disagreement. You think that offering up your content merely represents a non-binding expectation. In other domains, we don't take that position. If I weave you a scarf, and I say "Hey, i'll give you this scarf…
Let me flip it on you. Let's say you bake me a cake and give it to me. The following week you say, "Hey, you need to go to the store and pick up some cough medicine for me, because I gave you that cake." If I then refuse, would it be valid for you to claim I stole your cake?
In your scarf example, I also probably indicated to you that I would accept those terms. Suppose that I told you, upfront, before you gave me the scarf, "No, I'm not going to pick up cough medicine for you, period. If you hand me this scarf, I'm still not going to the store."
If you still handed the scarf to me after I made it clear I wasn't going to the store and made no effort to take it from you by force, could you claim that I stole from you?
Funnily enough, the second scenario is not entirely fictional. I remember a particularly scummy practice that businesses used to do when I was growing up where they'd mail you an unsolicited physical item and then demand payment or return of the item.
I don't remember if it was illegal at the time or if it became illegal later, but the basic gist was "if you post something to another person in the mail, you can't later demand that they send it back to you or pay you."
On the modern web, I connect to the NYT to read some text, and they return a bunch of unsolicited code that I never agreed to request. The idea that I have the obligation to run code that I never requested from the server (literally, my ad blocker prevents the request from being made) when I never agreed to any terms surrounding that code is... crazy to me. In any other domain we would call that crazy.
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> Pushing an ad to my browser is stealing - namely CPU cycles and network bandwidth. My terms and conditions (which they implicitly agree to by answering an HTTP request from me), forbid them from supporting themselves with advertising. Great, and if those are your terms and conditions, guess what, nobody forces you to visit their websites.
Look, the only implicit conditions on the Web are those of networking protocols - which work in the following way: I can request whatever I want. You can do whatever you want with my request - namely serve it (e.g. HTTP 200 + data), refuse to serve it (e.g. HTTP 4xx / 5xx), or ignore it (just terminate the TCP connection, or not accept it in the first place). Whatever you choose, our interaction ends there . Whatever…
Not true. There exists a thing called contracts. Contracts allow two (or more!) parties to come to complex agreements about the manner and conduct of transactions. Terms of contracts can be quite broad, and specify the manner and mode of consumption, use, or disposition of goods and services.
Now, there is some debate over whether or not web users can meaningfully agree to such contracts. This is a legitimate debate. What is not a legitimate debate is how the semantics of the HTTP protocol relate to any of this.
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Humans didn't implement physical reality, you have no choice but to live in it. If you use the internet to distribute your content however, you agree to its rules. And unlike physical reality, you may choose another platform to distribute it that conforms to your views. You may say that the internet is the most popular way to distribute content, but it didn't get there by accident.
You believe that protocols ought to represent binding contracts, then? Does that mean that exploiting bugs and stealing people's money is a perfectly legal and justifiable use of the internet?
The issue sites have with ad blocking is because they demand from their visitors more than they agreed to on the protocol level.
I think it's terrible for our health and our minds.
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I can't believe you're being serious. OK, let's take it a step further. What about this: in the middle of the book the author says you can't finish reading if you don't stand on your head. Will you do it? Classic reductio ad absurdum. We are free people. You are free to invent your own terms. You can propose any rules. You can declare that visiting your website without clicking five times on different buttons is unet…
> I can't believe you're being serious. OK, let's take it a step further. What about this: in the middle of the book the author says you can't finish reading if you don't stand on your head. Will you do it? Classic reductio ad absurdum. That is not an ad reductio argument in the least. It's a silly condition, but if the author requires it, then you must do it, or you can simply not read the book. What part of basic s…
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> In this case there is no contract. The websites are really giving their things away for free, only with the expectation , but no guarantee, that some users will see ads. This does seem to be the crux of our disagreement. You think that offering up your content merely represents a non-binding expectation. In other domains, we don't take that position. If I weave you a scarf, and I say "Hey, i'll give you this scarf…
They're different because in the scarf example, you're expressing the expectation before giving the scarf. In the web example, the expectation is applied retroactively. It's as if you gave me the scarf, no strings attached, and later said "oh, since I gave you that scarf, I also want you to go to the store and pick up some cough medicine for me". On the web, we have a way to handle the exact equivalent to your scenar…
I'm glad we've come to agreement, then :). I agree, if the expectations are unstated, there is no agreement, and nobody is bound by unstated expectations.
If the website makes you agree to not use an ad blocker, you agree, and then still do it, that's stealing. If you do not undergo this interrogative exchange, then it's not stealing.