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.

Comments

Suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Suggestion

[phantomfive]

3) If an ad gets served containing malware, the website is liable for punitive damages in court.

Ha ha ha ha

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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

should have thought this one through...

[Thud457]

Ted Nelson says "how's that World Wide Web working out for you guys?"

Memo to the NAA:

[kheldan]

Dear NAA:

• First and foremost: We don't want your shitty ads.
  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

Re:Memo to the NAA:

[crackspackle]

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.

The title intentionally misquotes the NAA letter for sensationalism. Brave intends to replace publisher ads with their own. The NAA said "Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website.". They technically said "use our content" in reference to what was happening and then compared it to and offline form of what would be theft.

All that aside, the whole argument about copyright infringement vs theft is that you're not depriving them of their original work or material gain from it. For Brave's plan to work, it would be doing exactly that. And yes, Brave has stated the intend to pay publishers a share of the profit on Brave's terms, all without publisher agreement. On what planet does that work, walk into a business, set my terms and they have to recourse but to accept? If Brave's plan is so great, they can do what others do and sell it and get a consenting agreement first.

Re:Meanwhile

[Z00L00K]

I agree, and adblockers are necessary to avoid my bandwidth being stolen by ads and the risk of malicious ads intruding on my computer.

Bansy on advertising

[houghi]

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

Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking

[tepples]

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.

Re:Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking

[bmo]

>original content needs some sort of revenue.

Fine. Do subscriptions, or "ad fewer" like Wonkette does or convince your users to whitelist you, like FARK does (they also do subscriptions, so Drew can pay for his Maker's Mark).

>The race towards paying for nothing and getting everything for free seems somewhat out of sync with me.

It's not about paying nothing anymore. Users are quite happy to fork over money for subscriptions (hulu, netflix, amazon prime, etc) for content if it's at a decent price and not a fucking "MINE ALL THE USERS" for demographics. And when a subscription is paid for, if you promise no ads, don't do ads like the cable channels have done with bait-and-switch over the decades.

If you want to rely on ads instead of subscriptions, that's your own decision and not the users'. The users get the final say in what they display on their own terminals. Not you. If this isn't what you want, then change your damn business model.

I block ads because they are a security risk. When the ad industry finally decides to come up with some fucking standards that treat the users with respect, I'll stop blocking. But that is highly unlikely, because the ad industry and the dweebs that hire them are rapacious assholes.

They've thrown dead goats down this well for well on 20 years. Sorry, you guys fucked up, and you are no longer tolerated. Go. Away.

inb4 "but the ads pay for the free content"

if you can't convince your users to subscribe or whitelist you, then your content isn't really all that worth it, is it?

--
BMO

Re:Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking

[Cito]

That's why I run the best script for grease monkey plugin ever.

Adblock Detector Blocker for Grease monkey.

You can watch Hulu ad free, have zero ad or paywalls anymore on news sites. Read the entire new York times without paywall pop-up.

Grease monkey with adblock detector blocker
Ublock adblocker
No script

3 greatest plugins ever to enjoy a web like it was when I was working for isp in 1993+ erases social media and ads from the net and unlinks all sites from each other via social and analytics sits, blocks statcounter, Google analytics, Alexia, etc.

Re:Meanwhile

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Meanwhile

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.