The original report: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and....
Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."
Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."
If copyright infringement is considered theft, then AdBlock would've to be considered akin to theft too. They're inherently the same thing. You're consuming the content without providing the expected revenue to the owner.
From my perspective, neither can be considered theft. Which is why I use AdBlock, too. But if either is theft, then the other would've to be too.
You could very well argue that AdBlock is technically worse then copyright infringement, because you're still using the bandwidth of the provider. With "piracy" you're sharing the content through other avenues.
Just nitpicking here, but that does not make adblocking and copyright infringement similar. Copyright is not inherently about revenue. It's about who has legal control over the distribution of the work.
It's also true that (outside of criminal copyright infringement) the only remedy that a court can offer is monetary. But that fact doesn't mean that money was the real issue at hand.
Copyright is violated when a work is distributed or reproduced (or performed or... there's a few categories).
If I take a website, duplicate it, then publish it myself, I am engaging in copyright infringement.
If another person comes along and views my website, they are not engaging in an illegal act. It's the act of distribution that is infringing, not the act of receiving.
In your example, if a publisher creates a website and distributes their content, that publisher is exercising their rights to distribute that work. But there's no strings attached, there. Unless I sign some sort of binding contract that stipulates that I must view ads in order to receive the content, there is nothing in copyright law that says I'm in any way stealing or breaking the law by blocking those ads.
And if such a contract was in place (say, a click-through ToS... though whether those are enforceable is a question), my blocking those ads would be a contractual violation but it would not be "theft" in any meaningful sense, nor would it violate copyright law (it would be a violation of that specific contract).
So no, they are not "inherently the same thing". A publisher publishes their content. As a receiver of that content, I can do whatever I wish with it, including censoring/redacting the portions I don't want to view. Similarly, if I bought a newspaper and cut out all the ads before I read it, no reasonable person would consider that "theft".