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Newspapers Try To Stop Ad-blocking Browser Brave From 'Stealing Content'
New reader DarkLordBelial writes: The newspaper Association of America (NAA) has sent a letter to Brave Software, makers of the Brave browser, detailing how little they think of Brave's proposed solution. In the letter, NAA says Brave Software "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts." The letter suggests that replacing adverts with their own selected ads is no different to republishing the content and therefore copyright infringement. In response, Brave Software says all such assertions are false and that the NAA has misunderstood their business model. Founded by Mozilla's co-founder, Brave pays its users in bitcoin to watch ads. According to the company's plan, a website gets 55 percent of the money, whereas rest is distributed among users and Brave.
Other browsers have ad-blocker add-ons
What the NAA published is ludicrous and disconnected from reality; but they're not wrong: if Brave actually did what they claim, it would be roughly akin to stealing their content just as if they'd copied it to their own server and republished it. It's like tying a string to a door and hooking up a shotgun, then trying to claim you didn't shoot them.
This is called a strawman argument: the NAA made up something easy to attack and used it to attack something defensible. Since what Brave actually does is actually a sort of partnership between publishers and the browser manufacturer, it's really fucking hard to trample down.
If you want to attack Brave, attack it on grounds of being an unsustainable business model.
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You can keep posting as AC, but we all know exactly who you are
How about an add blocker with the following properties... 1: It only accepts adds on the right ( or left, user selectable ) margin, and 2: it only accepts adds up to a user selectable total size. A web site could send down 5 small adds or one big add or get blocked part way through a really big add. This would give the advertisers an incentive to create less irritating and smaller adds and the web site could charge more for being one of the first adds to be sent to the user.
NAA says Brave Software "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts."
Lol, wat?
Seriously, is this grasping at imaginary straws, or what? Let's be clear here: what I do with MY browser on MY internet connection is MY business, not yours. If I choose not to display certain content or (GASP) swap it for other content, that's MY choice and is not reason to try and drag anyone into court.
Then:
Users: hey can you give us less intrusive and annoying ads
Advertisers: screw you here is your ad
Now:
Advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: screw you
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Ted Nelson says "how's that World Wide Web working out for you guys?"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
With mandatory unblockable advertising This is the future, and Linux users will not be supported, only telemetery enabled OSes will be.
Not really, considering everyone blocks all the ads. Well, everyone that isn't a moron.
Use a screen-reader for the blind. At worst, they graphical ad will be replaced by text read off in robo-tone by my computer.
Oh wait, now the newspapers will claim that screen-reading software is illegal too since it blocks the pictures of the ads.
--
Seriously, back in the last century, I browsed "with images disabled" mostly for speed reasons, but it had the nice side-effect of blocking most ads.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Secondly: We really don't want your shitty content that much, either.
Third: You're like dinosaurs stuck in a tarpit; all these wailings, whingings, and whinings about your 'ad revenue' and how us ad-blocker users are 'stealing your content' is just your death-song.
Do you want to survive? Stop saturating us with shitty ads. Get a sense of scale and apropriateness. We're not going to pay attention to your ads anyway, but at least we won't block them if they're not playing video, flashing, doing shitty animations, popping up in our faces, or otherwise being annoying to the point where we want to punch the screen.
Also, while I've got your attention: Stop tracking us. We hate that shit. It's at least half the reason we block your shitty ads in the first place.
Get correct, or get extinct. Choice is yours.
Sincerely,
The Internet
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
One of my first jobs was delivering advertising tear sheets for a small town newspaper.
You didn't make that. The news is the news. Ads are not the news.
Maybe if ads didn't obscure half of our iPhone screen space and not go away when we try to read stuff, we wouldn't need to ad-block it. Especially the ones that autoplay.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
ADS steal my bandwidth, I should be compensated.
ADS could infect my system, I should be compensated.
ADS collect personal information from my system without consent, I should be compensated.
If I don't read the newspapers ads in the print edition, is that stealing?
If I cut out the ads, and lend the paper to a friend, is that stealing?
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. FUCK THAT. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe then any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
-- Banksy
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Oh wait, now the newspapers will claim that screen-reading software is illegal too since it blocks the pictures of the ads.
Then report said newspapers to disability advocates in the appropriate jurisdiction. If worse comes to worst, they'll bring a lawsuit alleging disability discrimination, as the (U.S.) National Federation of the Blind did to Target.
RSS includes the headline and perhaps the first sentence, not the entire article, I assume.
To catch a fish, to catch a fish, to catch a fucking fissssssssh
Because modern fish fishers know that only fishy fish can catch fish, not luddite non-fish shit.
Fish!
Was this a First Flounder?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Forbes straight up admits that it treats Firefox's "Open Link in New Private Window" as an ad blocker. Because Forbes doesn't do privacy, I don't do Forbes.
In the early half of the 20th century there was a huge push to stop highway billboard advertising. They are ugly and block your view of the countryside. Notice how that ended up.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Fortune added an add blocker detector. As a result, I never read Fortune articles anymore, or share them with any friends. Clearly this was their intention, and it worked.
I guess that tells me that I don't need their content. That likely proves true for every web site on the internet.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Instead of yanking unsupported hypotheticals out of your cavernous ass and pretending they have some value (other than entertainment), how's about you hitch up your teensy tiny bollocks and actually take Brave to court and actually have a judge say that.
Oh, wait, that's right. You have just enough functional brain cells to understand that you'll actually lose. Humiliatingly, in fact.
Keep barking, yappy dog. Your teensy tiny teeth intimidate no one, and you're trapped behind the fence of your outdated business model anyway.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Except newspapers, like the rest of the mass media aren't relevant.
To become relevant they're going to have to go old school and do actual journalism rather than click-bait headlines.
And if they want to generate revenue from adds, they're going to have to serve static images or text with links, no flash, html5, noise, or screen-blocking.
Fine. Do subscriptions
Most people are unwilling to buy a year's subscription just to read one article. So how do you "Do subscriptions" without turning away users who arrive through citations in search, social media, or other aggregators?
or convince your users to whitelist you
Good luck with that when these sites insist on allowing cross-site interest-based advertising and proprietary JavaScript.
Users are quite happy to fork over money for subscriptions (hulu, netflix, amazon prime, etc) for content if it's at a decent price
Then let me draw an analogy: Paying for a year of Amazon Prime to watch one episode is likely not "at a decent price".
It sounds like to me that the newspapers are taking ownership of the ad content. If so, that means they get to take ownership of the malware that is part of the ad content.
Proverbs 21:19
I'm a bit surprised that this is generating so much attention. These types of browsers are not new, case in point: https://adtrustmedia.com/ I can't imagine users would download Brave willingly. If I were the newspapers, I would wait for this browser to die out on its own.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Hmm. I would hope that the NAA would work with Brave to produce acceptable ads (to at least an interested party) instead of the stuff we're currently getting. I didn't know about the BitCoins thing.
Ads on the web are not like ads in newspapers or magazines.
1. They tend to spy on you, violating your privacy
2. They are now frequently animated, which is visually distracting and annoying (and actually PAINFULLY distracting to a relative of mine with a visual impairment) and cause further visual disruption when they change size/shape on the fly, causing the page to keep reformatting.
3. They steal money out of your wallet, particularly the video ones, because they consume bandwidth and eat away data budgets that the user is paying for
4. They interfere with the ability to browse other pages not benefitting from the ad revenue, as they bog-down machines and network connections (video ads: you're guilty) and run scripts that access ad resources on slow servers thus stalling browsers.
I suspect most people would have few problems with ads that behaved like magazine or newspaper ads, just sitting there on the borders of the page, not making sounds, not jumping up&down, not causing the browser to stall before eventually popping up a "broken script" dialog, and not spying on the user. Companies who used to put ads in newspapers and magazines never used to assume they'd get spy data on the readers; they put their ads before the eyes of potential customers and watched to see the effects on sales. By allowing these clowns to get away with a little spying, they've become used to it and now feel entitled to unlimited spying. By allowing them to get used to hijacking OUR machines and OUR internet access, they've become used to it and now they feel they have a right to eat up as much of OUR monthly data caps as they want to.
No matter how much these jokers whine, THEY are busing US and stealing from US when they do anything more invasive or data-intensive that a standard static ad.
IIRC, in the book Contact, the Hayden character from the film made his billions by developing an ad blocker for televisions. It would mute the tv whenever a commercial came on.
See subject: I stop it for free & the most efficiently + natively APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Less power/cpu/ram+ IO use vs. local DNS servers + addons w/ less security issues vs. DNS + routers. Less complex vs firewalls (needing layered filtering drivers - hosts don't + firewalls block less used IP addresses, hosts block more used host-domain names) complimenting 'em. Antivirus = reactive. Hosts = FAR more proactive, blocking infection BEFORE you get it. Gets its data from 10 reputable security community sites.
APK
P.S. - Hosts get you more speed (hardcodes + adblocks) & faster vs. addons, security (vs. bad sites/dns security issues), reliability (vs. downed/poisoned dns), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) vs. other "so-called -solutions'" w/ what you natively have. Unlike Adblock/UBlock/Ghostery, hosts != blockable by ClarityRay/BlockIQ
The last time someone tried federated subscription, it was called Adult Check, run by a company called Cybernet. I guess the name meant "You're an adult; you can pay for nice things now." But one problem with Adult Check's business model was that as a payment processor, it was vulnerable to accusations of vicarious copyright infringement. When participating publishers included infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10 magazine on their sites, the publisher of Perfect 10 successfully sued, and as far as I can tell, Adult Check shut down soon after.
How do you plan to shield your business from your participating publishers' infringement?
Perhaps they should change their business model. Tracking if someone actually watches ads penalizes web site operators (such as the newspapers in this case) for not viewing ads. Add to this that not everyone has the bandwidth to run video ads and block ads so that it doesn't take 10 minutes for websites to load up because of all the bandwidth an ad steals from a website visitor. In addition, you run the risk of a drive by download attack if you don't block animation ads. Even more, it becomes a royal pain when you are reading the contents of a website and some video is playing on the site even if the sound is disabled. I'm sure if TV advertisers were to use a business model where a company only gets the ad revenue if the people watching TV actually watch them, TV stations would be complaining because statistics would show that only a small portion of TV viewers actually watch TV commercials. Viewers fast forward through commercials, use a commercial break to go to the bathroom, etc. Why should people visiting a website have to give up their privacy, bandwidth, and potentially risk their system security so that the website can make money?
Maybe the true cause in lost revenue can be traced to a lot of customers not viewing the websites anymore. A lot of media companies do a poor job of designing their website leaving users with a bug riddled mess and the advertisements. Some have decided to tell me what stories I will be interested in viewing and I don't agree with their belief that these stories would interest me. Some have made it so you have to advance through several pages of flash animation for a slideshow in order to read the article and to go back to the site you were before you read this story you have to press the back button in order to advance through all the photos or animation in a slideshow again. Some have even relied on Facebook posts and Twitter feeds to tell their story. If I wanted to see Facebook posts or Twitter Feeds about a story, I will create a facebook or Twitter account and see these posts myself rather than going to a news site to see their cherry picked posts. CNN and other sites have changed their "Terms of Service" recently and when you go to their site in large red print is a message stating that their terms of use or privacy policy has changed and by using their site, you are agreeing to these updated terms of service or privacy policy. Who has time to read pages of information about their new terms of use or privacy policy? If I see such a message, I just go to another site to read about this story who doesn't announce in a big red message that they changed their terms of service or privacy policy and your use of their site indicates you agree to these new terms. Since I don't have much bandwidth, I avoid video coverage but many news sites (even newspapers who writes their stories in print) will only offer videos to watch so if you want to read at your own leisure, you will need to go to another site. Some have tried to hard to get people to sign on to Facebook or Twitter while on their site when not all of their audience have Facebook or Twitter Accounts and some who do are not interested in having Facebook or Twitter collect the stories you read. Some sites offer an "ad-free" option if you are a paying subscriber but once you log in to their exclusive non-ad section, you are bombarded by ads or greeted by the message that you will need to disable your ad blocking software. If you are paying not to have ads then why should you be served up ads or be required to disable any ad blocking software in order to view their exclusive ad-free site?
The ads website put in their pages run on MY computer consuming MY resources and driving up MY expenses in terms of computer wear and tear, electricity, and TIME, all without warning or explicit authorization. If anything, those websites are the ones stealing. When I choose to use a browser which pays Me to watch ads it is because I deserve compensation.
It's a derivative work, but courts are more likely to find a derivative work to be fair use if said derivative work is not stored permanently nor distributed to the public. See for example Galoob v. Nintendo.