4 ms·

> Would you consider it stealing if you read the before-the-fold content of a newspaper through the glass of the dispenser and then didn't buy the newspaper? Wo

• alex_young 8y ago
  > The litmus test for stealing here is breaking an agreement. This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party. No one owns your attention.
  • darawk 8y ago
    > This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party. Indeed this is the question. If you haven't meaningfully entered an agreement, then I don't believe you're obligated to abide this term. However, that's sort of the question. What constitutes entering an agreement? How explicit do they have to be exactly to make it enforceable? I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that there ought to be some standard by which you can be considered to have agreed to some sort of service-terms.
    • mirimir 8y ago
      If sites want to force the issue, they can block ad blockers. Also, with GDPR, this argument is about to become perilous.
    • stepvhen 8y ago
      as a baseline, to constitute entering an agreement, each party must have a reasonable idea of what they are agreeing to, as well as the capacity (mental, emotional, physical, rational, etc) to actually make such an agreement. to enforce an agreement, it must be recognized that some term.has been broken by some party. ad providers, as a collective (that is, no single actor is responsible by themselves, and not every actor is at fault) began breaking the terms of the implicit agreements with Pop-up ads, ads with sound, ads with visual motion, ads with full video, ads that look like real articles, ads that block actaul content from the website you are visiting, dishonest or misleading ads, targeted ads without the users consent, ads that are significantly louder than the video you are watching, ads that hijack your mouse, etc. each of these phenomena were introduced after previous terms were implicitly agreed upon, that is, they were introduced without informing the user beforehand. and so, as a collective, ad providers have broken the agreement much more and morw often than users who wholesale block ads. in this moral economy then, the users have the high ground.
• keldaris 8y ago
  > I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads. In addition to the counterarguments you've already received, I'd also like to note that the quote above is simply your personal opinion. Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify how their content is consumed, none of which are absolute and most of which vary wildly between different jurisdictions. The same applies to moral obligations. If a content creator specified that you must kill yourself immediately after consuming their content, no reasonable person would interpret that as a legal or moral obligation. Clearly, there are limitations to the conditions content creators can impose, both legally, morally and as a matter of fact. I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where content creators have the legal right to force you to watch advertisments (that is to say, avoiding watching ads is against the law). Personally, I feel no moral obligation to watch them either, but this is a matter of opinion and obviously you disagree, which is fine. I just don't see how you have any claim of obligation beyond a personal moral sense here.
  • darawk 8y ago
    > Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify how their content is consumed, none of which are absolute and most of which vary wildly between different jurisdictions. Not really. What's limited is not content creators ability to specify consumption, but rather the assumption of the ability of the counter-party to understand and agree to the terms. There are some genuine content restrictions, like first sale doctrine, but those are fairly narrow in scope. EULAs are limited not by the fundamentals of the medium, but by the assumed ability of the customer to meaningfully agree to the terms. If you want to argue against my position, you should be taking the position that your average web surfer does not have the ability to meaningfully agree to the terms of the contracts with all of the websites they visit, and that thereby those contracts are unenforceable. That is the correct and only correct objection to the moral obligation to view ads.
    • c22 8y ago
      You could argue that web users with adblockers are rejecting these agreements by refusing to HTTP GET the linked ad content and that the sites are accepting the modified terms if they subsequently serve the requested non-ad content.
• c22 8y ago
  Thank you for the response, I found it illuminating. You seem to contradict yourself, though, you claim you view Tivo use as stealing but later you make a concession to my view: > If the website does not say that you have to watch the ads to view the content, then i'd say that it's not stealing. Same with television, by the way. I have never seen a TV program imply that I must watch the ads in exchange for consuming the content. Given this, how do you support your claim? Or are such messages common on television in your locality? Also I have a follow up question for you: You say using the mute button during the ads qualifies as stealing (for the moment, let's assume the program has come with explicit terms requiring you to watch the ads), would you still consider it stealing if I had left the television muted for the entire show? Am I obliged to unmute the TV when the ads come on? Does the answer change if I have been selectively unmuting parts of the program (for instance if I was just interested in watching the daily doubles on Jeopardy)?
  • darawk 8y ago
    > I have never seen a TV program imply that I must watch the ads in exchange for consuming the content. Given this, how do you support your claim? Or are such messages common on television in your locality? Sorry, I should have been more clear. I consider it stealing if and only if that agreement is made explicit. Most television channels i'm aware of do not do this. So fast forwarding / muting is not stealing. But in principle it could be, if they specifically requested that you not do it. > Also I have a follow up question for you: You say using the mute button during the ads qualifies as stealing (for the moment, let's assume the program has come with explicit terms requiring you to watch the ads), would you still consider it stealing if I had left the television muted for the entire show? Am I obliged to unmute the TV when the ads come on? Does the answer change if I have been selectively unmuting parts of the program (for instance if I was just interested in watching the daily doubles on Jeopardy)? This is an interesting question to explore. In some sense, you're consuming a fractional portion of the content (i.e. the visual portion), and you are consuming the same portion of the ads. So, there is some sense of symmetry there, which seems intuitively appealing as a standard to me. If I were adjudicating this personally, i'd say that seems acceptable, unless the terms of the content delivery explicitly forbid decoupling the audio/visual channel in this way.
• mirimir 8y ago
  > > What about just using the mute button? > Yes. Seriously?
• ionised 8y ago
  > I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads. And luckily there are plenty of content creators that don't think that way.