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Again your analogy is flawed. YouTube displays ads and you circumvent them in some way and take the product, in this case a video. Similarly you go to Walmart,

Again your analogy is flawed. YouTube displays ads and you circumvent them in some way and take the product, in this case a video. Similarly you go to Walmart, the equivalent of YouTube.com, find a product, analogous to finding a video, and take it without paying? Analogous to watching the advertisement. Your analogy makes more sense for Google search in that you can search and see results and simply choose to not click ads, whereas on YouTube you cannot choose to not watch some of an ad, without paying. The key part in a metaphor around this is that you must circumvent in your comparison, since that's the main thing being done here. Simply choosing to not do something isn't circumvention unless that's the implicit expectation (e.g. paying for something you took).

marssaxman 4y ago
Your analogy fails because digital goods are non-rivalrous. Were I to shoplift a video from Walmart, they would no longer possess the video; my gain would be their loss. Obviously this is not true in the digital domain, so moral reasoning about physical stores is unhelpful. What I receive, when I visit YouTube, is a list of links: invitations to stream certain videos. Google hopes that I will choose to accept all of its offers, since some of the videos are paid advertisements: but it's my computer, and my network connection, and I can do what I wish. Google cannot obligate me to receive any of its videos, any more than I can force Google to supply anything its servers don't want to share; the streaming operation must be mutually agreed. As it happens, I do not care to spend my time or my bandwidth streaming the ads Google offers me, and I have therefore configured my browser, which runs on my computer, which I own, to act in accordance with my preferences. If Google does not like this arrangement, they are free to change it; nobody is forcing them to supply me with video content.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Again this argument that digital goods are worthless. Google doesn’t hope anything - Google places ads, and people use technology means to get through.

marssaxman 4y ago

Your analogy fails because digital goods are non-rivalrous. Were I to shoplift a video from Walmart, they would no longer possess the video; my gain would be their loss. Obviously this is not true in the digital domain, so moral reasoning about physical stores is unhelpful. What I receive, when I visit YouTube, is a list of links: invitations to stream certain videos. Google hopes that I will choose to accept all of its offers, since some of the videos are paid advertisements: but it's my computer, and my network connection, and I can do what I wish. Google cannot obligate me to receive any of its videos, any more than I can force Google to supply anything its servers don't want to share; the streaming operation must be mutually agreed. As it happens, I do not care to spend my time or my bandwidth streaming the ads Google offers me, and I have therefore configured my browser, which runs on my computer, which I own, to act in accordance with my preferences. If Google does not like this arrangement, they are free to change it; nobody is forcing them to supply me with video content.

endisneigh 4y ago
Again this argument that digital goods are worthless. Google doesn’t hope anything - Google places ads, and people use technology means to get through.