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Comment by Wolfenstein98k | Hacker News Reader

I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft.

I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see.

But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seems akin to sneaking into a movie theatre.

This isn't the equivalent of avoiding looking at something (your choice), it's the equivalent of breaking into a private business and pinching the products without paying.

(Cue the usual argument about IP, tangibles vs intangibles, and various dismissive remarks arising from cognitive dissonance)

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I think you’re engaging in some cognitive dissonance yourself to justify ad-blocking. The situation really isn’t any different. The ads are what pay for the product, so if you purposefully block all the ads, you’re not paying for the content you’re reading.

It’s up to you whether to pay attention to the ads, but outright blocking them is exactly the same as blocking the “please subscribe” wall.

Ad-blocking can be justified as the digital equivalent of averting your gaze, although I agree that's a bit tenuous as it's preventing the ad from rendering in the first place. It's marginal. But by analogy, it's like putting your TV on mute when the ads are playing - the producer made the show freely available expecting ad consumption.

But using a tool to get past a paywall is different. The show is not on TV, it is more like a rental without ads - and this tool is used to pick the lock to the rental store and then take all the rentals you want without paying.

I guess I agree that blocking the ads is worse than averting your gaze, actually. It prevents the producer ever getting revenue. But at least that's a risk they knowingly take with that funding model - paywall aversion is clearly not.

...yet!

> But by analogy, it's like putting your TV on mute when the ads are playing - the producer made the show freely available expecting ad consumption.

The difference is that you need to actively mute your TV every time! You're probably not going to do it for every commercial break, and even if you do, you'll likely catch at least a bit of the first ad. It's really that first ad's fault for not grabbing your attention quickly enough while it had the chance.

Put another way, the advertiser is paying for ad space, and it's the advertiser's responsibility to use that space in a way which catches your attention. Whether the advertiser succeeds or fails is nobody else's problem. An adblocker, however, completely removes the ad space.

TIVO has had the ability to skip ads for about 20 years now IIRC. I have a bandwidth cap on Comcast and don’t want ads to count, however insignificantly, against that. I also don’t trust JS and companies from ad networks to respect my privacy or keep data they collect about me safe. I’d rather (and I do) just black hole route all their junk from known ad networks on a DNS level and let ublock handle anything that does manage to sneak through. If they’re going to go through the trouble of making that not work, they’re probably not worth my time visiting.

> TIVO has had the ability to skip ads for about 20 years now IIRC.

Does TIVO skip automatically, though? I know that when Dish tried to do that in 2015, the TV networks sued. Don't remember who won, but I'd personally be somewhat sympathetic to the TV networks.

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It's not about you. Websites are selling a product for a price; you're jumping the turnstile and saying it's okay because the fare was too high anyway. By all means, don't visit websites with overly intrusive ads, let the the price and demand curves even themselves out.

Or, if you do block ads—because I get it, the world is imperfect—at least acknowledge that what you're doing isn't entirely ethical or fair, and stop encouraging others to do the same.

This is usually a topic I try to avoid on HN because it feels like such a loosing battle, but somehow I walked into this one. :)

There is at least one other reason for adblocking: ads - even those on reputable sites - have been used to spread malware. Blocking ads thus is like using a condom, where your partner has insta-sex with hundreds of others the moment you get undressed.

Not "it is better", but "you'd be insane not to".

Secondly, I've never ever heard of a case where the site showing the malvertisements offered any sort of compensation to their victims. If that's how sites like to see the ads, all profits to them and zero responsibility, I see absolutely zero problems with adblocking.

My understanding of the tool is that it actually _is_ the equivalent of avoiding looking at something. The browser either has been delivered the content already or has access to the content, but it's wrapped in an advertisement to subscribe instead of an advertisement for some third party. Looks like it uses the same mechanisms that tools like uBlock use.

Similarly, I avoid looking at the advertisements bundled in my USPS mail (which are often advertising subscriptions).

This is what I meant - this is a technical justification that dodges the point.

How the info is rendered isn't really important to my claim - that it is fully intended to be restricted unless you pay, and you wouldn't be able to see it without employing this trick.

The trick is expressly designed to get you around a "paywall".

This is retroactive justification for sneaking past the security guard when he's looking the other way, and helping yourself to the products without paying. It's just fancy theft.

(By contrast, not looking at mail advertising is just averting your gaze, and ad-blocking is reasonably comparable. But using a tool to get past a locked door is not analogous at all.)

I hope this won't fly in any sane court. If these articles are meant for customers only, then it's on the news company to use reasonable authentication and authorization of their customers.

The practice discussed here is more like the scam where they forcibly put a "good" in hands of a prospect, saying it's a gift, and then demanding a payment.

It’s the same age-old piracy problem that Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, Disney+, etc have mostly solved. Make a product worth paying for and more convenient than piracy and people will pay a reasonable price for it. Shove ads down peoples throats and play games with hard-to-cancel subscriptions / BS pricing and people will correctly value your product near worthless and act accordingly. It’s up to you as a company to prove your value to users. Throwing up a paywall that is easy to defeat protecting content that isn’t worth much in the first place and is riddled with ads is a great way of telling consumers that they shouldn’t trust you.

>but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft

It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on.

If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.

What did the publisher lose that he had before?

resources to transmit data over a network.

I don’t think this extension receives additional data that the publisher did not willingly provide. Besides I am pretty sure many others would be willing to offer said resources for free (if it wasn't for “good” guys with assault rifles showing up to enforce information and knowledge transfer controlls)

Revenue for the service obviously. If everyone acted like the people in question and nobody paid for the service it could not sustain itself, so paying customers effectively subsidize free riders.

They never had it, thus does not meet the definition of theft.

Well, the publisher paid people for their writing (or content), and then hosts it for revenue.

The publisher didn't pay them in order to give it away for free.

If you start using digital lockpicks to pick their digital lock, and consume their content without paying, they have lost the revenue haven't they?

(Cue "they're not entitled to revenue for intangible goods", and other libertarian arguments that are internally cohesive but not accepted by the public)

Internal matters are just that, internal matters. You cannot enforce information transfer controls (without prior agreement with that person) because you allegedly paid someone to produce data, and want to make money off of it.

You have been awarded 8 good boy points by the Ministry of Intellectual Property. Please collect your prize at the Ministry of Love.

Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text.

I always find it hilarious how the strong IP bullies like to reinforce the status quo, empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.

>empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.

Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot.

This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of they value they produce.

There is only one digital property rights regime I can get behind -- Bitcoin. It is opt in, and based on a software enforced consensus independent of States and Governments.

Everything else is coercion. I do not subscribe to your flavor of authoritarian strong IP.

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