3 ms·

You can't be serious with this. You think it's a bug that a website doesn't know what I'm going to do with the bytes they send to me? I think the fundamental i

by Touche 11y ago

You can't be serious with this. You think it's a bug that a website doesn't know what I'm going to do with the bytes they send to me? I think the fundamental issue you are having is that you don't believe in property rights. Namely you don't think that my computer is mine, and that stuff that gets transferred to it; assuming the transfer was done legally in good faith, belongs to me. I highly doubt you feel this way about meatspace; I doubt you think someone who hands me an apple has the right to tell me how to eat it. Yet when it comes to computers, you do feel this way. pdkl95 has done a much better job than me of arguing this point, so I should probably just stop. But it bears repeating: HTTP is not a contract. Sending me your content is not me agreeing to do stuff that is linked on some other page. If you want me to agree to view ads, or paypal you $20 first, or give you my first born child; you need to send me to another page first where I agree to it. TOS is not a gotcha. You can't trick people to agreeing to something; there has to be a "meeting of the minds".

ikeboy 11y ago
>the transfer was done legally in good faith This is precisely the point that I'm disputing, not the notion of property rights. You still haven't given any definition of the terms you're trying to use to justify a distinction between the two. You claimed that any time someone requests something over http and the server sends data back, the person cannot have been doing anything illegal. You have not given any principled difference between that and the cases where courts found differently. I've linked to lawyers making the same argument as me; I don't believe you've found any lawyers who agree with your claims here. Re contracts: as I've said, that applies to scenarios when you've agreed to TOS. If you know a website has certain terms, then accessing it is agreeing to them. So your point is only valid if you can credibly claim that you didn't know the website doesn't allow ad blocking. If you think you can convince a judge that you had no idea some websites don't allow ad blocking, and that you therefore had no intention of breaking any agreements by browsing the web with your ad blocker installed, do whatever you want. But the very fact that we're having this conversation and you aren't telling me "no website would ever outlaw ad blockers in their terms" means that you recognize it as a possibility. It would be an interesting legal question as to whether mere probable knowledge (i.e. negligence) can suffice to be liable, or one would need to demonstrate actual knowledge: if the latter is found to be the legal interpretation, then I suspect ad blockers could be required to recognize when a site refuses to be viewed with an ad blockers, and not show the site at all then. Installing an ad blocker that doesn't do this would then be malicious. This is admittedly speculation, although it gets closer as to what the actual legal question would be here. If you can cite precedent that bears on this directly, that would be better.

by Touche 11y ago

ikeboy 11y ago

>the transfer was done legally in good faith This is precisely the point that I'm disputing, not the notion of property rights. You still haven't given any definition of the terms you're trying to use to justify a distinction between the two. You claimed that any time someone requests something over http and the server sends data back, the person cannot have been doing anything illegal. You have not given any principled difference between that and the cases where courts found differently. I've linked to lawyers making the same argument as me; I don't believe you've found any lawyers who agree with your claims here. Re contracts: as I've said, that applies to scenarios when you've agreed to TOS. If you know a website has certain terms, then accessing it is agreeing to them. So your point is only valid if you can credibly claim that you didn't know the website doesn't allow ad blocking. If you think you can convince a judge that you had no idea some websites don't allow ad blocking, and that you therefore had no intention of breaking any agreements by browsing the web with your ad blocker installed, do whatever you want. But the very fact that we're having this conversation and you aren't telling me "no website would ever outlaw ad blockers in their terms" means that you recognize it as a possibility. It would be an interesting legal question as to whether mere probable knowledge (i.e. negligence) can suffice to be liable, or one would need to demonstrate actual knowledge: if the latter is found to be the legal interpretation, then I suspect ad blockers could be required to recognize when a site refuses to be viewed with an ad blockers, and not show the site at all then. Installing an ad blocker that doesn't do this would then be malicious. This is admittedly speculation, although it gets closer as to what the actual legal question would be here. If you can cite precedent that bears on this directly, that would be better.