While consuming the content, you’re avoiding paying some content its price, because you protest how the content guards its commercial interests. Thus, ahoy!
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Working to avoid the excesses of surveillance capitalism isn’t piracy, it’s self-defense.
Time is our most precious resource and advertisers are here to waste it. I have no qualms telling them to fuck off.
i do block ads because they waste my time. that’s still piracy, and there’s a bajillion ethical reasons to commit piracy
Arr, batten down the hatches and hoist ye sails, matey. It’s time for some pirating!
The deal is between the person paying for the ad and the person displaying the ad.
I wasn’t ever involved in the deal, I owe them nothing.
I think this is the only reply that hits the mark. Most of the others are mentioning malware, the morals of adverts or how obnoxious they are. To steal implies to take without payment, but the payment is not from the viewer, it is from the advertiser,who is paying.
I’d argue that blocking is more similar to taking a restroom break when a commercial is shown on the TV. No reasonable person would say that that’s stealing.
thing is with ads you can block, the advertiser is not paying if the ad is blocked.
i agree that taking a restroom break while an ad is showing is not piracy. that’s not blocking the ad, though.
I’ll try to argue about something I know little about. Don’t advertisers pay for ads served? Don’t many ad blockers work by hiding the ad from view, like making it’s size 0x0? On my older devices, I can see the ad show up, then disappear. Doesn’t that then imply that the advertiser must pay for the ad eve though it does not show on my device?
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn’t that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/95614/do-ad-impressions-count-if-the-user-is-using-an-adblocker summarizes Google Ads’s documentation at https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/141811?hl=en (TL;DR: pay depends on whether a script/request attached to the ad element is performed).
It’s true that different adblockers do different things, but the most popular ones do block the requests too. One of the most popular arguments for adblocking is performance and bandwidth. If we only hid the ad from view without doing that, we would not get the performance and bandwidth savings that adblock brings. So, µBO blocks the requests.
You can confirm yourself whether the request is blocked by searching “ad” (or “doubleclick” specifically for DoubleClick Ads, which are the majority of Google Ads) in your browser DevTools’s “Network” tab. Compare when the adblocker is off vs. on; for me with µBO the majority of requests aren’t even attempted and disappear when their entire element is ad-blocked, and in these cases the pay script doesn’t load either. The screenshot above only shows some requests that were attempted and blocked.
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn’t that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
No, screen readers would still read ads. Just having the screenreader move to the next element is the same as scrolling past the ad. The difference is that if the advertiser doesn’t give alt-text, the content can become nonsensical. But the advertiser still pays.
You can approximately check an ad’s text for a screenreader with Firefox DevTools’s “Inspect accessibility properties” feature.
Excellent write up!
thank you!
Correct, but how does that make it not piracy? Is something being piracy or not predicated on you being party to some deal?
Let’s say a movie is not released in my country. I cannot buy it so I torrent it. Did I not pirate the movie because there was no deal I was involved in? Because that’s what your argument says.
No it isn’t. I was talking about ad blocking.
you are involved in the deal, because advertisers pay by how many times the ad is displayed (or clicked). just like how you are involved in the deal between the distributor and cinema, because the pay depends on how many tickets you buy.
If that’s the extent of my involvement, Following that thought, an ad blocker means I’m not involved in the deal anymore?
as much as sneaking into a seat in a cinema without paying means you’re no longer involved in the deal. so yeah, you might have a point that you’re no longer involved in any deal, but i’d still call that piracy.
The fact you have more comments than up votes means this is a legit unpopular opinion, Good job 👍
Agreed. Though I don’t think these people should be downvoting an opinion here simply because it’s unpopular. Either that’s my unpopular opinion, or there’s some other reason they’re downvoting.
Ads are egregious attempts at brainwashing you into buying something. Blocking ads is morally correct. If something relies on ads, then its business model is broken.
Also: pirate paid products until you figure out if it’s worth it’s money. Also, buy exclusively software without anti-consumer practices and DRM (games on GOG, Bandcamp), also pirate capitalist propaganda movies like Marvel, Hollywood stuff if you like watching it.
Also, buy used hardware, since almost all the hardware companies are extremely into neoliberal capitalism.
While DELL makes great laptops, I’ll never buy a new product from them.
Content blocking is not piracy, at least when accessing government resources.
I’m the sole decision maker as to what content I download to my personal devices, and that goes for web content as well as other things. If I don’t allow content from domains like doubleclick.net then that’s my right and nobody can overrule that decision.
Precisely. I was just making a very stroong point that cannot really be countered.
It isn’t in any way piracy. I am under no obligation to pay attention to ads.
not paying attention to ads is very different from blocking the ads
Not to me.
but to the website’s wallet
If they didn’t track me and spy on me I wouldn’t have a problem. But they track me and spy on me so they have to go. That isn’t piracy. Its not getting ripped off. When there are no definitive laws or rules then I can’t break them.
If one of the pirate parties succeeded in implementing their platform, I’d still call the act piracy there.
Okay. Its clear you have a vested interest in it being wrong. Its not and its not illegal.
by “the act” I meant things that are more popularly understood as piracy. even if torrenting cracked Assassin’s Creed was legalized, I’d still call torrenting cracked video games piracy.
Or give them access to my network or my compute.
Downvoted cause I agree. Adblock is based and so is piracy.
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I don’t HATE hate ads. When watching Twitch, sure I get an ad every 15 minutes I think. But the fact that there is technology for ANYONE in the world to see someone’s computer screen in almost real time, have a chat room, and (almost) for free (well, for $0. I pay with my time watching ads)
But seeing the SAME AD, EVERY TIME, makes it annoying. I don’t know why Twitch thinks I will watch FNAF 2, but seeing the ad 10 times will not convince me to watch it.
Change it up. Make me go “oh, what’s this ad about” not “oh NOT THIS AGAIN”. That is a gaurenteed walk away for a water break.
Is throwing away unopened junk mail stealing from the post office? Its the exact same thing
post office gets paid either way, website doesn’t. you’re describing looking away from the website’s ads while your ad-blocker’s off.
Post office only gets paid because some portion of people do open them; they would make much more money if everyone did.
If everyone throws away junk mail there’s no money, if everyone blocks ads there’s no money. It’s the same system but with better attribution for impressions.
the analogue there would be clicking on the ad. google ads, probably the most popular single platform, has two kinds of ad payment: per-click and per-impression. by just receiving it and throwing it away you get rid of the former, but by blocking ads you get rid of both. (there’s also the fact that most people do not block ads, while most people do throw away junk mail)
and if everyone throws away junk mail, there’s still money, because the post office got paid to deliver it. same goes for not blocking ads but not looking at them.
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Hmm… People in your comments either conflate ads with telemetry (you can have tracker free ads) or they don’t understand that there is value in ads equal to at least a fraction of sold content. Maybe they’re triggered by the term piracy, which admittedly is a strong term, but honestly your core argument is correct.
I’m pro-piracy, though, and certainly take pride in picking and choosing who or what I put value in. It’s more obvious with paying a patreon or buying a product you already pirated, but allowing ads to play (or at least giving a video view though to trigger the counter, liking and subscribing, etc) is also a form of support. And yes, you can do so without completely violating privacy although they’re certainly making that harder lately…
to be fair, the most popular ad platforms like google ads use trackers, so it is something to consider. but i do agree that this kind of lumping is bad since this thinking hurts ethical ad platforms too.
I reject your premise that ads are the payment for content. I would equate ads on websites to tipping; a completely optional form of income for the website.
I don’t tip.
What about services where you pay but still get ads? Netflix? Cable?
In UK people pay for TV if they have one. In Germany people pay for TV, Radio even if they dont have one. Does it stop ads? Nope! Except you can’t block them on radio wave level unfortunately. At least on the web you can.
Edit: forgot dont
That makes the piracy a lot more ethical and probably something I support.
