551–560 of 598 posts
Admiral's product is so poorly designed that it requires cooperation from the browser to work? That violates rule #1 of client/server programming: never trust the client. Instead, they have to abuse the DMCA to cover for their uninformed engineering choices. This is despicable. "Here hold this copyrighted content in memory for me, but don't make any other copies of it because, uh, you don't have the license to make c…
The DMCA only applies to the US. Fork the repo and move on. It's time to forget about American hosting.
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But there is no expectation that a restaurant will serve you without paying. There is an expectation that a website will ask for payment/authorization if required, otherwise I'm not required to pay. Moreover, there is no way to know if the content you're requesting will require a transaction (unlike a restaurant where the prevailing expectation is payment for service, even if prices are left off the menu). It has alw…
Perhaps the better analogy, then, is that it's kind of like an unattended farm stand with an honesty box. Except the honesty box isn't visible on the way in, it's located on the back of the enter sign so you only see it on the way out, and the driveway is so long that surely you've already started munching on the fruit while starting to leave. Since I'm still on a food kick the whole expectation-of-paying thing is st…
The issues is that there is normally a expectation of paying for things like produce. Unless there was explicitly a "Free Produce" sign, I would expect to have to pay.
There is no expectation that you need to pay for the data sent to you later; if payment is required for access, you're told so and need to provide it to continue to the resource (or otherwise provide proof that you had paid, e.g. logging in).
There hasn't historically been and can't be an expectation of payment later because that would be untrue for many, if not the vast majority, of websites. Additionally, there has never been an expectation that the client will render everything you send to them. All browsers have the option to disable JS and images, and always have.
It's these differences in expectation and culture that I believe provide the difference between your examples and the web. Violating these constraints would cause legal issues in the vast majority of systems, would mean running old software would be illegal (Chrome preloads links under certain circumstances, but doesn't render them), and would also end up forcing users to run code they didn't choose to run (there is no expectation or knowledge of what code the server will send and choosing to not run harmful code would be illegal), which would be an interesting thought experiment as a civil rights violation. It would also force me to, say, accept a EULA for Flash, even if I disagree with it because I visited a site that randomly sent me a flash payload. Or what about something without a linux runtime; I would have no ability to avoid committing a crime, because I don't have the choice to accept the rest of the content that came with the content I can't run, but am legally required to run.
Violating the very assumptions of how the web works would have terrible ramifications.
> More on topic: I also think courts would see quite a difference in intent between using a mainstream graphical browser with an ad blocker vs using things like a text mode interface, a screen reader, a braille display, or libcurl.
Why? They're all the same thing. I'm deciding how I want to consume content; I'm not circumventing a access control mechanism.
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I wonder if folks could get sneaky and change the design from a literal url to a regular expression tailored to single out that url but would also include additional sites that are just gibberish and could be relaxed if useful sites ever do fall into the URL overlap. This might be a new line of research to craft regExs to filter out a specific string while also throwing out a bunch of sister gibberish strings that wo…
You probably did not understand the issue. The domain in question is a part of a copyrigth protection scheme. Blocking access to it is a circumvention of copyright protection scheme and it is illegal under DMCA. No, you cannot block hosts that are a part of a copyright protection scheme and you cannot distribute the software that does that. How you block the domain - with a simple string or an automatically trained n…
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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 liabi…
As I added after you replied, I agree that this is an improper use of the takedown procedures. However, your reward for successfully armchair-lawyering that may be a full-on Federal lawsuit. Also, I agree that Easylist itself may still not be a lawsuit target. It simply makes a claim about a certain domain, it doesn't do any access circumvention itself based on that claim. But if Easylist isn't, the ad blockers using…
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So, they serve you the food, and you pay for it. But, you choose not to eat the raw onions they've served with the meal. This would be the analogy of choosing not to render html/javascript content.
At the risk of destroying my efforts at being reasonable, suppose it's an "if you eat the whole thing, it's free" situation, except there is no "$19.99 if you can't finish" else clause. You know that they didn't offer an else, yet you eat anyway, and you slip your onions into the plant in the corner.
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You probably did not understand the issue. The domain in question is a part of a copyrigth protection scheme. Blocking access to it is a circumvention of copyright protection scheme and it is illegal under DMCA. No, you cannot block hosts that are a part of a copyright protection scheme and you cannot distribute the software that does that. How you block the domain - with a simple string or an automatically trained n…
I can block anything I like. And I can do whatever I like to help others do that. And I'll make sure that nobody can stop me, or them, or threaten me about it.
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It's not specifically about the DMCA; it's about legal issues in general. Intent matters in the vast majority of law. You'd be hard-pressed to argue in front of a judge that your intent wasn't to block this specific site, based on the sequence of events: 1. Site added to block list. 2. Site removed from block list due to DMCA takedown request. 3. Site block by new rule added that doesn't target it directly. I can't i…
OK, why not circumvent the "argue in front of a judge" aspect? Instead of a list hosted on GitHub, put it on some server that's very hard to take down, leased anonymously. You could get EasyList, and then add back whatever's been removed. And make sure that no logs are retained concerning user input.
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But there is no expectation that a restaurant will serve you without paying. There is an expectation that a website will ask for payment/authorization if required, otherwise I'm not required to pay. Moreover, there is no way to know if the content you're requesting will require a transaction (unlike a restaurant where the prevailing expectation is payment for service, even if prices are left off the menu). It has alw…
Perhaps the better analogy, then, is that it's kind of like an unattended farm stand with an honesty box. Except the honesty box isn't visible on the way in, it's located on the back of the enter sign so you only see it on the way out, and the driveway is so long that surely you've already started munching on the fruit while starting to leave. Since I'm still on a food kick the whole expectation-of-paying thing is st…
> disable JS and images
> They're all the same thing. I'm deciding how I want to consume content; I'm not circumventing a access control mechanism.
I guess the difference I am trying to highlight is:
* a lack of ads for hard technical and/or compatibility reasons (JS not enabled, images not enabled, graphics subsystems not existing, not having sufficient eyesight, etc.), versus
* a lack of ads because screw you.
This line in the sand may be stupid, but I'm afraid it's not "the same thing." I'm afraid this difference could be argued successfully in court, and that is my point.
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They're not claiming copyright on the domain name. They're saying that by blocking it, they're violating the anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA.
Since when does the anti-circumvention section of the DMCA have anything to do with the notice-and-takedown section of the DMCA?
The admiral website has a copy of a notice [1] if you are interested.
[1] https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-...