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Ad blocking is under attack

blog.adguard.com

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Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#221

Post by mod »

nicc wrote: post #155
danarmak wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC, the DMCA says that if there's some technological mechanism X that's used to enforce copyright, and a tool Y that is (or can be) used to circumvent X, then making or distributing Y is itself illegal (as opposed to the act of using Y to circumvent X, which is already illegal even without the DMCA). The DMCA then provides a notice-based method for 'taking down' online copies of Y. In this case, X is the Admiral te…

Thanks, I understand better now. If Admiral enables paywalls, then I kind of agree with Admiral. If companies want to put paywalls, circumventing them is kind of like jumping the gate to see a concert for free. I always hit the back button, but publishers should be free to put up paywalls (no idea why they don't do it server-side, but that's another story). So, I guess the article or at least the title are a little s…

> If Admiral enables paywalls, then I kind of agree with Admiral.

I do and I don't. I think paywalls should be allowed to happen, but I don't think EasyList is circumventing paywalls. The companies that use EasyList might use it to circumvent a paywall, but what they do with a list of domains is up to them.

If I grabbed the EasyList repo, there's no way I could use it to circumvent a paywall. Nothing in that repo carries that functionality. It's not a matter of semantics or mincing words, either.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#222

Post by geekamongus »

djsumdog wrote: post #185
jrochkind1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMCA is not the appropriate tool for this. Filing a DMCA takedown notice when you know that there is not any copyright infringement going on in the document you are asking to be taken down is a misuse of the DMCA, and an entity filing such a takedown can be liable for any monetary damages or attorney fess of the other party. Although I don't know that's ever happened, it's in the law as a penalty for intentional misu…

There are many cases of DMCA abuse, and it'd be nice if someone had the resources to go after these, get them fined and help set a precedent to prevent further abuse. Unfortunately, that probably cost more than it's worth.

EFF?

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#223

Post by jrochkind1 »

jerf wrote: post #214
jrochkind1 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be, cite to the law or description of it? I'm interested in learning more. What I see in the law ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 ) is that a "notification of claimed infringement" must include "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such w…

Part of the challenge here is that "the DMCA" is a number of clauses. People who are "against the DMCA" often turn out to have an incoherent position, at least from a legal standpoint, when it turns out they just disagree with one of the contentious clauses. This would in fact be the most contentious clause, the one about being able to take down tools that enable circumvention, the one that is historically the one th…

The DMCA does make distributing circumention measures illegal, but I can't find anything in the law, or discussions of it, saying that the takedown process applies to circumvention measures. The takedown process says an ISP like Github is not liable for copyright infringement if they respond to takedown notices, which is what creates the takedown process. It doesn't say anything about circumvention measures and liability with regard to notices though.

What the DMCA says about circumvention measures:

> (2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

> (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

> (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

> (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

It seems obvious to me that Easylist is not such, I don't think it meets A, B, or C. But it'd be an expensive court process and who knows what the court would end up doing.

In this example, it seems like Easylist has no desire to include that URL anyway, as it is not an ad server.

It may be true that Github can decide to refuse to host the thing anyway, but it's not a DCMA takedown notice process.

The whole situation is indeed a mess.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#226

Post by CaptSpify »

colept wrote: post #206

I have a very unpopular opinion that pulls me in two directions. Advertisements have exceeded the point of being a nuisance for many years. But adblocking is a fight that solves symptoms and will affect more than just advertising in a negative way. The best parallel I can draw is to the Napster era when pirating music cut off the head of the chicken in the industry. Hollywood and like were refusing to adjust to digit…

IMO: The problem is an economic one. Our economic models are so out of touch with reality that there's no way to solve this peacefully within our current system.

There's no reason for middle-men or gateways in distributing digital media anymore, but we still don't have a reliable alternative to pay the artist. The distribution middle-men used to do that.

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#229

Post by goodplay »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #115
superflyguy wrote: post #27

Store a hash of the URLs instead of the URLs themselves.

I don't see how this would work when the URL lists are full of regexps etc. If you could make it work, you'd would wind up with some sort of source file of domains, parsed at build time to generate list of hashes that actually ship with your plugin. That source file would belong in a repo, and would still be DMCA-able in this way. Also, this would make ad-blockers even more CPU intensive than they are. We shouldn't h…

Agreed with seeking a legal solution instead of just relying on a techincal one, but if the problem is the string of characters, just hash those instead without hashing the whole host:

[HASH:1AB543.124A3CC4.1AB543]/ads

Re: Ad blocking is under attack

#230

Post by djsumdog »

colept wrote: post #206

I have a very unpopular opinion that pulls me in two directions. Advertisements have exceeded the point of being a nuisance for many years. But adblocking is a fight that solves symptoms and will affect more than just advertising in a negative way. The best parallel I can draw is to the Napster era when pirating music cut off the head of the chicken in the industry. Hollywood and like were refusing to adjust to digit…

There are solutions. Things like Patreon:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-yout...

Patreon is interesting because they host no (well very little) content, and can help some creators with a tip jar (some make $10/month) and others with a sustainable wage. It's a more well though out Flattr.

..and the thing is, everyone gets the end creation. Supporters get some extras or behind the scenes or rewards, but a small subset of fans can essentially support big projects that are often made available to everyone. Some youtubers use only Patreon and have removed all sponsored content/ads.

Support via ads is really not the way to go. To quite David Firth: "...Advertising is dog shit anyway. I don’t like all that subliminal suggesting; it’s poison..."

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