Whilst I would personally prefer videos with no ads, is this not stealing?
I would be very interested to hear this groups view on why this is morally ok. Also what alternatives there should be to an ad revenue model for YouTube type sites.
The usual response you'll get is "is it stealing if I go to the bathroom during a TV ad break?" or "that's why content creators have in-video paid sponsorship blurbs"
I personally think those are flimsy justifications though. I think it's stealing to bypass ads when the company hosting the service has a clear avenue for paid ad-free viewing.
It would be like creating an app that streams the free-tier of Crunchyroll ad-free while still using Crunchyroll's bandwidth. Dishonest.
"If there's a publicly exposed service with no authentication or security in place, it is not the fault of an individual for using it. It's clearly not illegal, and neither is it unethical. If [the city of Rome] wants to protect their [water service] from unauthorized use, they are perfectly capable of doing so."
I disagree that it is not unethical. I would hope most people recognize that abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is unethical.
Further more, it's not an ocean sized fountain run by a monopolistic corporation and one of the only places to get water, with simple technology to restrict who can get water if the corporation so decided.
All analogies are flawed. I would hope the difference between something being ethical and unethical is more than just a law.
Again... abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is (usually) unethical and dishonest, regardless of legality. Doesn't matter if you are plumbing your house with public water intended for tourists, filling your backpack with all the honey packets from all the Chick-Fil-A's so you never have to buy honey again, or buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of $1 coins from the government with credit cards so you can profit off of taxpayers. It's abuse of a free service, and it's unethical.
Also, why don't they just protect their endpoints with authentication? It would be simple. They choose not to. There is not an easy way to protect public water or Chick-fil-A honey packets, so ethics is the main mechanism. Not so with internet services. There are countless well tested mechanisms for this.
It's not easy to block third party access, it often ends up being a whack-a-mole style game where you block it and then they just get in using a different method. YouTube already has been doing this.
On top of this you are taking money from the creators of the content, not just YouTube itself and violating their terms of service.
If a service tells you not to do it, and you still do it anyway it's quite clear you are being unethical.
It wouldn't be wack-a-mole if they just had proper authentication instead of using the freemium model. It's their choice to open up their APIs to unauthenticated anonymous users due to their shady advertising revenue model, and the costs are calculated in their models.
BTW, I've never once read or signed any agreement with YouTube, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "the service tells you not to do it".
Even if there was more prominent messaging of the sort, it's not the job of the user to twist themselves in knots to assist wealthy rent seekers' desires to apply ancient business models based on physical property to modern information systems.
I will admit that I am not very fond of YouTube either. They have far to much control over the income source of a good amount of people. They could on a whim take away the monetization of a channel (which they do sometimes) and cause them a lot of financial strain.
In terms of your slave comparison I would say a better comparison would be if the slave owner was doing poorly the conditions the slave lives in are worsened. This highlights that the slave does not have much chances to acquire food on their own. I wish there was more competition but I do not believe starving the slave of the system fixes the owner of the system.
We're talking about unethical, not illegal.
If not then there's still a shortfall.
Until I can be absolutely assured I'm not going to be given a malicious payload from ad server I will not allow ads in my browser
What about ad blocking? Well you aren't actually blocking ads. You're electing not to request ads. I'm simply not interested in ads. It would be wrong for YouTube to sell my views to advertisers since I would just ignore the ads anyways. So basically they are actually the bad guy and I'm a hero.
Re: alternatives, the guys that make stuff I like I support through patreon / gumroad / PayPal / mail gifts directly to their PO box. Some of them host their own videos. Its cheap.
On the flipside the crap made that's supported by advertising is terrible - drawn out for revenue, totally soulless and generally for children. Who cares about that?
I do have a problem in paying for it with my data.
If the content creator wants my money for their service, they'll provide a way for me to purchase it without having to use an intermediate surveillance company.
Since I block the surveillance company by default, the content creator is not at a loss from me consuming their content without ads - for I simply would not be consuming their content at all otherwise.
OTOH, the creator may benefit from me viewing their content because I may find it interesting and recommend it to a bunch of other people, who don't have the same privacy concerns as me.
The Youtube ad model is probably not long-term sustainable. Content creators should be looking to find alternative delivery methods based on pay-per-view, or freemium subscriptions to get people engaged. You'll find many already do, as they have patreon pages in addition to their youtube, but patreon is also a surveillance company, so that's not an option for me either.
I don't mind paying for things with Bitcoin. Any content creator can accept money without requiring me to sign up to work for a surveillance company.
If you don't want to feed the "Surveillance company", then don't use Youtube at all. But it is quite arrogant to benefit from their work, acting entitled to it, and then turn around and shit all over them behind their back.
I'm not "entitled" to anything, but the content is accessible to me without being spied on, so this is the way I will consume it until the creator uses an alternative, non-surveillance company to distribute their content.
The onus is on the content creator to provide the alternative - not force me to be spied on.
But again, hidden behind that is indeed an air of entitlement. It implies that you are owed content from the creator, and if the creator decides to put it on Youtube, then they are giving away their rights to be compensated by you. And you still don't really acknowledge that what Youtube (not the creator) is providing you should be compensated either.
If you found a shortcut for getting food from a store without paying (let's say a big store like Walmart or McDonalds), do you think it's a fine thing to do? Do you think it's ethical to get the hard work of others for free, just because the company providing said work is rich?
The entitlement is actually from Google et al. They think they're entitled to aggregate your data simply because you visit their web page - but we know that the internet does not necessarily work that way, and an ad blocker can thwart their efforts.
I don't think I am entitled to other people's content, but I can access it - that's what happens when you put things in a public space like the internet. The content creator is fully aware that some people are going to block ads and they still upload it anyway. Perhaps they get more viewers by making their content public rather than hiding it behind a paywall?
The store comparison does not work because there is a deprivation of a physical product involved. No deprivation occurs with digital data which can be cloned an infinite number of times. You might argue that you are depriving the provider of bandwidth, but they have elected to make something public with the understanding that they may not be compensated for that bandwidth.
The surveillance business model is only sustainable for as long as people are willing to give up their data in exchange for services. If they are not willing, then Google et al will have to find a new business model. They aren't entitled to your data just because they've made some content publicly accessible and you have chosen to access it whilst maintaining your own privacy.
Perhaps there will be other options for monetization of content other than the surveillance-company-masked-as-advertiser model. Where you can pay for stuff without giving up your privacy.
"take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"