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Comment by angoragoats | Hacker News Reader

It’s not though:

* It’s definitely not stealing in the legal sense of the term, which requires a party to be deprived of physical property that they own.

* It’s also not in the colloquial sense of the term, because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web, taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber, or countless other activities that could be considered “depriving someone of revenue.”

In the US, we do in fact have a legal term for the crime at play here — but the term is copyright infringement, not “stealing” or “IP theft” or whatever other stupid label the content cartels want to apply to it.

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> because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web

Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.

>taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber

Yeah no, it's in the name...FREE TRIAL. It's literally given out for free.

>content cartels

Yes how dare companies/people want to get paid for their creative works, must be a cartel.

> Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.

I think I made an error here by assuming that every reader of Hacker News would be at least somewhat pro-adblocking.

So since you appear not to be, let me ask you:

* Do you use any ad blocker at all? If yes, can you define precisely when ad blocking is stealing and when it is not?

* If I visit a random website with ads, and I don't have an adblocker, the ads on that site may be used to track me across other sites, build a profile of me to sell to data brokers, serve me malware, bog down my system resources with audio, video, crypto-miners, and other garbage, or a myriad of other undesirable things. Would you consider any of these things to be the website (or the ad network) stealing from me? At what point, if any, does the website's right to extract revenue from me end and my right to privacy/security begin?

> Do you use any ad blocker at all?

With your second question:

Tracking - Tracking isn't stealing, that's a privacy question.

Building a Profile - I mean not stealing but also vague so not sure what's the point of trying to argue this one? Like if you keep going with this line of thinking you end up with "you looked at me funny which made me feel weird so you're stealing by stealing my joy". (Absurd example but trying to show how abstract arguments don't end up working) Then we would probably loop back to fallacy of composition.

Malware - Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.

Bogging down your resources/other garbage - I mean idk, case by case basis.

You keep trying to paint with broad strokes but that's not how these things usually work. In my original example, it works because it's a simple transaction the artist wanted. Pay me 1$ for my art and you can view it. They created it privately with the intent of selling, and by downloading it for free, you're breaking that intent and depriving them of potential revenue.

> Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.

I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence. So that is actually the primary reason why I use adblockers, and blocking the visual noise is just a nice side effect.

How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker? AFAIK there's no way for me to know ahead of time when and on what site malware will be served.

I'm sorry if you think I'm painting in strokes that are too broad -- I'm trying to understand your viewpoint here. I would also like to be clear that I do think copyright infringement is a thing, and in your example of "pay me $1 and you can view my art," viewing the work and not paying is ethically dubious and probably could be considered copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. I just vehemently object to it being called "stealing" as you've done here.

> I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence.

I would love to see a source of a large company like CNN knowingly serving malware in the guise of ads. I've never heard of that but I'm all ears; I feel like it would be big news if CNN knowingly put a crypto miner on your device.

> How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker?

I don't know but also now you're committing a fallacy known as "Irrelevant conclusion". Yes, there's a genuine question on how you can block malware without depriving website owners of their ad revenue, however it's irrelevant to the original argument of whether blocking ads is stealing (which we've somehow come to from a piracy argument but whatever). The argument becomes "Is blocking ads stealing when some of them give me malware", but that's separate from "Is blocking ads stealing".

Alternatively you might be trying to argue "but I block ads because some of them give me malware" which can be an appeal to pity[2], but I don't think you're trying to go that far.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity

Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies! I should just change my username to fallaciousgoats.

How about this: I didn't use the word "knowingly" anywhere in my statement, and in fact I have no earthly idea whether the countless examples [1][2][3][4] of malware being served via ad networks on major websites was done knowingly. My guess is it wasn't?

So you've got the beginnings of a straw man fallacy here, questioning an argument that I never actually made.

If you'd like to learn more about why malware shows up on cross-site ad networks, there's a good quick read available at [5].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550808

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

[3] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/01/18/google-ads-increa...

[4] https://blog.fox-it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-...

[5] https://theconversation.com/why-bad-ads-appear-on-good-websi...

> Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies!

Ad hominem

Haha good one!

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, and you've broken them in other threads too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695587 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539273 ).

We have to ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, that would be good.

I apologize; I’ll review the guidelines and try to do better next time.

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