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Legal and moral issuesLegal and moral issuesPosted May 4, 2009 21:47 UTC (Mon) by emk (guest, #1128)In reply to: Ethical issue by BrucePerens Parent article: Mozilla ponders policy change after Firefox extension battle (ars technica)
If you do decide to use one, and you block the ads, you're breaking the quid-pro-quo with the publisher or web site operator. This reminds me of a claim by the CEO of AOL-Time-Warner regarding DVRs:
Legally speaking, I don't know whether there's any validity to this argument, even if you omit the bogus references to "your contract" and "stealing." One relevant precedent is probably the ruling that CleanFilms and CleanFlicks were violating copyright law by editing DVDs for Christian audiences. But even in this case, the studios refrained from bringing a case against ClearPlay, whose software performed the actual edits at playback time on the user's computer, which is most similar to how ad-blocking software works. The other possible argument here is a moral argument, saying something like, "It's wrong to exercise your fair-use rights if doing so interferes with the business model of the copyright holder." In some cases, I might accept this argument, especially if the copyright holder makes a specific request that I look at their advertising. But in general, I wouldn't feel guilty about using a newspaper clipping service to clip specific columns from a newspaper, incidentally removing the surrounding ads.
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Legal and moral issues Posted May 4, 2009 22:02 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] Entertain a theory. If in the future, a whole lot of people contract bladder difficulty to the point that it becomes reliable that a majority of people will go to the bathroom during all advertising, don't you think that advertisers will demand changes in the way advertising is run? You'll start to see a lot of 10-second spots interspersed with content.Advertisers will absolutely not tolerate a reliable and widespread system for filtering ads from broadcast content. If one ever were to come about, they would obviously take action. Currently, the advertiser has a reasonable expectation that a significant share of people will view the spot. If they fast-forward through the ads, they will at least see the first few seconds of the first ad, and thus there may be a premium for that placement because they may be able to interest you enough in the spot that you will keep watching. In addition, you will probably see some amount of the subsequent spots. If you have a way to reliably remove all advertising, you're breaking the quid-pro-quo of the station.
Legal and moral issues Posted May 5, 2009 0:28 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
or they can do product placement in the programs themselves (which they do)
if advertisers want to stop this arms race, crying 'theft' for people not watching the commercials is not the way to do it, the way to do it is to make the commercials interesting enough (and relavent enough) that people are willing to watch them.
how many people with DVRs record the halftime show of the superbowl so that they can see the commercials that are broadcast then?
I am willing to pay for good content, unfortunantly the providers of the content are not (currently) willing to give me an option of paying for the content without the commercials. if they were to offer such an option and find that nobody was willing to pay for it they may have a point of some sort, but until they do offer such an option they are being greedy in asking me to pay for the content AND deal with the commercials.
Why should they? Posted May 5, 2009 6:25 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I am willing to pay for good content, unfortunantly the providers of the content are not (currently) willing to give me an option of paying for the content without the commercials. if they were to offer such an option and find that nobody was willing to pay for it they may have a point of some sort, but until they do offer such an option they are being greedy in asking me to pay for the content AND deal with the commercials. Some are doing this. LWN, for example. People are installing AdBlock instead. So you case is closed. This model clearly does not work without DRM and hardware support so we'll not see it widely used soon.
Why should they? Posted May 5, 2009 7:46 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
actually, I would point at lwn as a success story (although not a perfect one)
compared to most tech websites it has very few advertisements, they are pretty easy to ignore if you want to, and to top it off they allow subscribers to disable them.
I think it would be interesting to know how many subscribers disable the advertisements here. I suspect that it is far fewer than it would be at most other tech sites (assuming they offered the option) because Corbett has done a good job of keeping the advertisements from being too invasive. (he's made a few mistakes along the way, but he's fixed the fairly quickly)
Legal and moral issues Posted May 5, 2009 8:09 UTC (Tue) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] Television advertisers here in the UK are responding to a reliable, effective way to skip adverts by (shock, horror) making better adverts. Rather than go down the route of lobbying Sky (the dominant pay broadcaster) to disable the fast forward and rewind features of Sky+ and Sky+HD during adverts, they're making adverts that make you want to watch them. As a direct result, I don't skip as many adverts as I used to, and I'm starting to remember some of the products that are advertised (118 24 7 for directory enquires, for example). So, no, I don't buy your dystopian DRM future; note that Sky+ and Sky+HD are fully closed platforms, controlled by the provider who also sells adverts. It would be a simple software change to prevent me from skipping adverts, and yet Sky has chosen not to do so; not on paused live TV, not on recorded TV, not on the Sky Anytime VoD, not on PPV (where it's Sky promos until the paid-for content comes back wrong - NVoD, not VoD).
Legal and moral issues Posted May 5, 2009 17:18 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
With ad-skip on TV, you have to take affirmative action every time you want to skip the ad. So, if
the first 1-5 seconds of the ad are interesting, you might not hit the FF button.
With the adblock software for web browsers, they don't even get 1 second of your time. The ads are
Of course, someone *could* make an adblock program that, at a click, removed the ads from the
Already happens Posted May 11, 2009 21:03 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] If in the future, a whole lot of people contract bladder difficulty to the point that it becomes reliable that a majority of people will go to the bathroom during all advertising, don't you think that advertisers will demand changes in the way advertising is run?It already happens. The national grid registers a massive peak at the advert break during some of our more popular soaps as everyone puts the kettle on. The UK ad break presents an excellent opportunity for a brew :-) I suspect most people aren't feeling guilty about defrauding ITV out of it's ad eyeballs in the process. Using something like ABP is my choice about what runs on my computer (Freedom 0). If the web site doesn't wish to serve the content to me because the ad's haven't loaded then I won't mind. I'll just not visit the site again and go somewhere else for the information. I suspect there will be an technological fix that removes such sites from my search results and we can both go our ways enjoying the 'net as we wish it.
..forgot to add Posted May 11, 2009 21:07 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] You'll start to see a lot of 10-second spots interspersed with content.Sorry, I forgot to add that I don't see this happening. You'll notice TV ads in the UK are a lot less frequent than the US. This is because there is a fundamental tension between the commercial broadcasters and our zero-ad public television. I think the same sort of tension exists between no-ad and ad-heavy sites on the 'net - only more so.
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