IANAL, but I've always wondered if one good way to approach this is as a "micro-theft" of user resources. Specifically, network bandwidth, battery capacity, and

IANAL, but I've always wondered if one good way to approach this is as a "micro-theft" of user resources. Specifically, network bandwidth, battery capacity, and screen size. An additional theft, which is your attention, can also be priced according to "the market", and indeed, if an ad obscures another sites ad then there is, in fact, another (large) set of people the manufacturer is stealing from. Moreover, that last class of people have some powerful advocates in the way of the networks, to wit, Google. But this theft is less straight-forward, I think. I would argue that the most important theft, which is your right to be secure in your computer mediated dealings, is hardest to argue. But that's there, too. It's entirely possible that this theory has already been tested, and lost, in US courts.