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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Those are the terms YouTube sets out when providing you with the service. You can either pay for it (as the terms set out), watch with ads (as the terms set out), or not watch it. All other use is effectively piracy, and they have the legal and arguably moral* right to block you for not following it.

* Yes, it does cost them money to serve and store videos, and no that doesn't disappear with scale. YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day, and chances are every single video is on at least 2 continents at any given time. They don't get some insane volume price on the enterprise HDDs they use.

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> watch with ads (as the terms set out)

There is nothing there forcing me to watch the ads, or that forces the user agent (aka the browser) to behave in the way that server running the application wishes to.

Of course they get insane volume discounts. All big tech companies do. It makes me cry to see how much we pay for a ThinkPad. I wish I could buy one for that :')

Regarding morals I don't don't care. Not worth a discussion :)

What terms? I don’t recall agreeing to any?

> Your use of the Service is subject to these terms, the YouTube Community Guidelines and the Policy, Safety and Copyright Policies which may be updated from time to time (together, this "Agreement").

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Even if you don't think you have to follow them, they can still ban you for not following their terms, or not agreeing to them. They are not under an obligation to serve you video unauthenticated and/or without receiving what they expect to receive in return (agreeing to their terms and thus paying via ads or money).

There’s a terms.txt on my desktop that says by sending me data my browser can choose whether or not to render it. By sending me video data you agree to these terms.

And they're blocking you from receiving video? That's the whole point of this post.

Not sure what you mean. I can view them just fine.

I mean them blocking you from viewing it due to using an ad-blocker (or otherwise not using an official client). The OP comment was about "the war on ad blockers", which is what this thread is about.

I haven't agreed to any of that; don't remember signing anything. This stuff does not hold up in EU. My device, my rules.

This is in the situation they block you from watching if you don’t watch are. They are under no obligation to serve you/your device, so they can institute any amount of technical requirements to gain access to the content it hosts, those requirements being plainly laid out in the terms.

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