4 ms·

Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? I'm familiar with the defenses of adblocking and think they have some merit, but they seem trivially extensible t

Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? I'm familiar with the defenses of adblocking and think they have some merit, but they seem trivially extensible to piracy as well. The more salient comparison is between piracy and spotify (with or without ads)

Nextgrid 5y ago
> Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? It's not illegal to mute or look away when an ad is playing; delegating the task to a machine is the same thing, just more efficient.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Ah I was speaking ethically, not legally. Of course, adblocking isn't illegal and piracy nominally is. As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"
derekp7 5y ago
Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Some commercials still get through to you because you don't really need to get up and do something on every commercial break (or you can still hear them in the background). With Adblock, some ads still get through, plus in-stream product placements. BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you. To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.
  - deadbeeves 5y ago
    Piracy is illegal not because it is unethical, but because at some point in history some creators got rich enough to attempt to protect their profits through legislation. The action itself, the copying of information, is morally neutral. It's only illegal because, in theory, it precludes someone from making money from that copying. But that's nonsense, because by that standard it should also be illegal to not pirate and not purchase the copy.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      > Piracy is illegal not because it is unethica I'm not making this claim. I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly. [1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there
      - deadbeeves 5y ago

Nextgrid 5y ago

> Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? It's not illegal to mute or look away when an ad is playing; delegating the task to a machine is the same thing, just more efficient.

wutbrodo 5y ago
Ah I was speaking ethically, not legally. Of course, adblocking isn't illegal and piracy nominally is. As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"

derekp7 5y ago

Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Some commercials still get through to you because you don't really need to get up and do something on every commercial break (or you can still hear them in the background). With Adblock, some ads still get through, plus in-stream product placements. BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.

wutbrodo 5y ago
> Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you. To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  Piracy is illegal not because it is unethical, but because at some point in history some creators got rich enough to attempt to protect their profits through legislation. The action itself, the copying of information, is morally neutral. It's only illegal because, in theory, it precludes someone from making money from that copying. But that's nonsense, because by that standard it should also be illegal to not pirate and not purchase the copy.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > Piracy is illegal not because it is unethica I'm not making this claim. I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly. [1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there
    - deadbeeves 5y ago