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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.
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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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
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! --
I agree, and adblockers are necessary to avoid my bandwidth being stolen by ads and the risk of malicious ads intruding on my computer.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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.
Copyright law does not prohibit private performances, like a screen reader. It prohibits public performances.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Other browsers have ad-blocker add-ons
They're upset because he very well may have outsmarted them, and figured out a way for people to view ads. To be honest, if Brave is vetting ads, and paying me to watch them I'm likely going to give that a go, and with luck that'll be a perfectly fine solution to the current "OMG YOU'RE THIEVES" BS that sites are pushing, and the "OMG AD-BLOCKERS AM ARE THE DEVILS" that the advertising companies are pushing.
Om, nomnomnom...
There are some areas without billboard advertising. Go visit Seattle some time and marvel at the total lack of outdoor advertising.
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".
Yeah, but it's one thing to skip past the commercials (ala Tivo) or block ads. It's another to replace them in their entirety.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Not really. If someone hands me a newspaper, I am free to cut it, draw on it, tape over it, or anything else I want. The control over the content ends when the HTML with the site content is sent to me. If I want to hand the HTML to someone else to tape over the ads with different ads before I read that content, that is completely within my rights, both in the physical and the digital versions of this analogy. They can paywall the content and they're sure to get paid before I download it, but if they send it to me for no cost then they've chosen to give the content away. Remember: not retrieving advertisement images from a server somewhere is not "theft." Once the content reaches the user's private network, the user has unlimited rights to do with it as they please, excluding any restrictions under copyright law which basically just means they can't redistribute the modifications unless the fair use doctrine applies.