I'm a hardline free speech dude, but I find it difficult to justify "We changed around your copyrighted work to remove stuff we decided we don't like." If you don't like ads, pay up or go elsewhere. You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.
It's not a third party tool. It's a tool used by the first party (user) to modify information that was sent to him without effecting the publisher. I don't see how the publisher has any authority over what the user chooses to do with the information he obtained.
> I find it difficult to justify "We changed around your copyrighted work to remove stuff we decided we don't like." If you don't like ads, pay up or go elsewhere.
That's an interesting take on IP rights. By generalizing your argument, would you argue against newspaper snippets because a reader would only collect the article without adjacent ads? (with scissors made by a third-party, no less.)
> You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.
Fair use, Noncopyrightable items, old expired IP, and the public domain are all examples of rights I have to others IP. Rights have been - and I hope will continue to be - balanced between the concerns of IP "owners" and the rest of society to best serve everyone's interests. Tipping the scale in one side's favor like what you advocate here will disrupt that balance.
I do block ads, though, despite actually wanting to see them to support the site. My problem is in the potential for viruses and tracking, and while that's a separate issue a few other threads are already talking about, there's been disappointingly little actual progress in making sure you can browse safely without resorting to nuking everything. I've been following the development on Brave because their proposed methods seem like one of the few ways to actually make it work.
That is totally ok. For example, if I record a video from TV and remove the ads is that a violation? I think it is not as long as I use this video for myself and do not distribute it.
Copyright laws should not regulate what I do in my house or on my computer. I should be able to modify any copyrighted work as I wish as long I am not redistributing it (and yes, I should be able to inspect and patch copyright protection schemes too).
How?
How can that possibly be hard to justify for anyone that even believes vaguely in the notion of freedom, much less someone "hardline"?
Do you think I break the law (or ethics) if I take the ads insert out of a newspaper I buy without reading them? How about if I hire a secretary to do so?
> This third party tool is making unauthorized edits to the New York Times' copyrighted material.
At the request of the first party (you) after receipt by the first party. They're not packaging it up and reselling it, they're automating your curation of a work you legally own a copy of for the purposes of your own consumption.
> You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.
Then the NYT should stop giving it away free.
I find the arguments pretty spurious and it's best not to engage.
It's their website. If you don't like their website, we got a whole other internet to enjoy.
Publishers would be better served if they restricted their articles, by demanding payment upfront before serving the article, rather than unreasonably and unrealistically demanding that people consume their content in a certain way. Don't blame your users for your failed business model.
As a side note, Copyright is not the place where this issue should be tackled as no copyright is being infringed (Content is not being redistributed).
Free sampling for the purposes of cultural remixing is explicitly built into (US) copyright (across media) as a mitigation to some of the harmful effects of artificial monopolies on culture. It's a compromise between those who think artificial monopolies are the only way to encourage the creation of culture and those who view such contrived monopolies as a net negative. There's a fundamental difference between copying and stealing. You seem to be intentionally conflating them by using phrases like "stuff other people made". It's not really "stuff" that they're "taking" and the copy is made by the copier, not the original composer. Nothing has been taken besides the right to artificially restrict the behavior of other people for the purpose of rent extraction.
Secondly, they give me a copy free when I request it. It just has ads included. But there's no reason I'm obligated to read the ads. It's exactly the case where they give me a free paper with an ad insert and I have the secretary throw away the ad insert before I read it.
Do you think I'm a monster because I throw out the ads in my weekly periodocal unread?
(For the record, I'm taking about ad blockers, not bypassing paywalls -- I generally just don't go to those sites. Your arguments hold more weight when discussing bypassing paywalls.)