> A good parallel would be a local newspaper that gets send for free to everyone, but also includes ads. I'm completely free to ignore the ads in this case.
Of course you are. That's a very different scenario. I get junk mail all the time. It goes in the trash. Always.
It is UNSOLICITED.
> It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something.
Exactly!
You are destroying your own construct here.
The very first time you visit a website, you see ads. If you disagree with advertising and you visit that site again with an ad blocker, you have made a decision to steal their product.
They did not force you to visit a second time and you know they use ads to finance their existence.
They did not send you unsolicited content.
This is theft, because, to use your own definition, you "actively take something", by explicitly going to their site and blocking their potential revenue streams.
You might say: Well, since I have an ad blocker I have no way of knowing who has ads.
Right. Sure. Let's add that to the series of delusions supporting such thinking.
> I ask via the official way to ask for the content and they decide to send it to me. What I then do with the content on my local system is completely irrelevant and I have to right to modify it however I want, as long as I don't make it public or use it commercially obviously.
These sites support jobs, families, businesses. You think you are entitled to take their work product for free because you think so, because you think so, because you think so.
That's what it comes down to at the most basic: You think someone should work for you for free because you don't like what they do to pay for their salaries. Instead of not consuming their work product, you happily steal it. What do you think lies behind these sites? Robots? Picture a family having dinner next time you enable your ad blocker, perhaps that will introduce some humanity in your thinking.
I find that issues sometimes become much easier to understand when we explore the limits. In this case the obvious limit is 100% ad-blocking. The world-wide consequences would be severe way before we got to 100% blocking. The internet would likely collapse very quickly without advertising. People like you find all kinds of creative ways to rationalize stealing the work of others. If you don't agree with how they generate cashflow to pay for their salaries, don't consume their product.
The other thing I find is that people having such ideas, generally speaking, are folks who have never in their lives launched and operated a non-trivial business where they had to be responsible for the payroll that supported dozens of families. It is way easier to think of a website as a URL with no humanity behind it when you have never had such experience in life.