I'm curious about this point of view. Would you consider it stealing if you read the before-the-fold content of a newspaper through the glass of the dispenser and then didn't buy the newspaper? Would it be different if you did it at a newsstand? At a coffee shop? If I buy a newspaper, read it, and then give it to a friend, would that be a form of theft? Is using a Tivo to prerecord a show then fast-forwarding through the ads stealing? What about just using the mute button? What if I watch all the ads but never buy any of the advertised products?
From my point of view advertisers pay to access channels where they believe their messages will have an impact. Presumably they will pay more for higher-impact channels and less for low-impact ones, it would be unreasonable for them to expect their message to have 100% consumer penetration. If people without technical expertise have chosen to package "valuable" content along with a low-impact advertising channel in a way where the ads can be trivially stripped and relying on these ads to be profitable I posit that these entities deserve to go out of business and stripping their ads is no more stealing than buying a gizmo from a company that has unwisely decided to offer their product for less than it cost to produce.
> Would you consider it stealing if you read the before-the-fold content of a newspaper through the glass of the dispenser and then didn't buy the newspaper? Would it be different if you did it at a newsstand? At a coffee shop?
Reading through the glass may be a bit different, because the glass is transparent on purpose to entice you to buy the paper, so they intend for you to do that. That is, it's part of the deal they're making with you.
> Is using a Tivo to prerecord a show then fast-forwarding through the ads stealing?
Yes.
> What about just using the mute button?
Yes.
> What if I watch all the ads but never buy any of the advertised products?
No. Advertising is a risk taken by the advertiser. The contract is that they pay for the content and you consume the message. You're under no obligation to be impacted by that message.
> From my point of view advertisers pay to access channels where they believe their messages will have an impact. Presumably they will pay more for higher-impact channels and less for low-impact ones, it would be unreasonable for them to expect their message to have 100% consumer penetration. If people without technical expertise have chosen to package "valuable" content along with a low-impact advertising channel in a way where the ads can be trivially stripped and relying on these ads to be profitable I posit that these entities deserve to go out of business and stripping their ads is no more stealing than buying a gizmo from a company that has unwisely decided to offer their product for less than it cost to produce.
I think you're right in a certain sense, but also conflating some things. Let me clarify a bit. If a website clearly states "You must watch the ads in order to consume our content", then I believe it is stealing to contravene that. They have stated their terms, and are providing content to you contingent upon your adherence. If you break that agreement, you're stealing. Simple as that. If the agreement is not explicit, that's less clear. If the website does not say that you have to watch the ads to view the content, then i'd say that it's not stealing. Same with television, by the way.
The litmus test for stealing here is breaking an agreement. I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads. If they don't specify, then i'd say you're free to do as you wish.
> I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads.
In addition to the counterarguments you've already received, I'd also like to note that the quote above is simply your personal opinion. Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify how their content is consumed, none of which are absolute and most of which vary wildly between different jurisdictions. The same applies to moral obligations. If a content creator specified that you must kill yourself immediately after consuming their content, no reasonable person would interpret that as a legal or moral obligation. Clearly, there are limitations to the conditions content creators can impose, both legally, morally and as a matter of fact.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where content creators have the legal right to force you to watch advertisments (that is to say, avoiding watching ads is against the law). Personally, I feel no moral obligation to watch them either, but this is a matter of opinion and obviously you disagree, which is fine. I just don't see how you have any claim of obligation beyond a personal moral sense here.
> Content creators often have specific, limited legal rights to specify how their content is consumed, none of which are absolute and most of which vary wildly between different jurisdictions.
Not really. What's limited is not content creators ability to specify consumption, but rather the assumption of the ability of the counter-party to understand and agree to the terms. There are some genuine content restrictions, like first sale doctrine, but those are fairly narrow in scope. EULAs are limited not by the fundamentals of the medium, but by the assumed ability of the customer to meaningfully agree to the terms.
If you want to argue against my position, you should be taking the position that your average web surfer does not have the ability to meaningfully agree to the terms of the contracts with all of the websites they visit, and that thereby those contracts are unenforceable. That is the correct and only correct objection to the moral obligation to view ads.
You could argue that web users with adblockers are rejecting these agreements by refusing to HTTP GET the linked ad content and that the sites are accepting the modified terms if they subsequently serve the requested non-ad content.
Yep, that'd be a reasonable case to make. Although the site could simply augment its terms with "Serving the content any way does not represent a change in terms; proceeding to consume our content remains in violation" to clarify.
While we're into making one-sided arrangements, one could add to the HTTP headers: "Serving this request in any way consents to having the content returned displayed in a matter that is determined by the user-agent and the user. This supersedes any other terms of service that purport to governing the processing of this requerst."
This, at least, has the precedent of accurately describing how websites have been presented since the days of NCSA Mosaic.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure that unread terms presented from either side should have anything to do with it.
I disagree with you on quite a few different levels and, for clarity, I'll attempt to separate them out in this reply.
First of all, you've completely conflated the distinction between legal and moral obligations. Your entire argument in this post is a legal argument, from which you jump to an entirely unfounded moral assertion. Even if I agreed with your legal argument, which I don't, the moral conclusion would not follow. Since you've offered no moral argument, I'll confine the rest of my response to the legal issues.
Secondly, your legal argument seems specific to the U.S. legal system (for instance, you reference the first sale doctrine, which is specific to U.S. copyright law). In most of the world, I'm happy to note, EULAs are a legal non-starter and TOS are significantly limited by legislation. To give you a concrete and topical example, the GDPR directly invalidates virtually all existing website ToS in the EU (exceptions exist, but are few and far between).
Thirdly, even in the context of the U.S. legal system, which I am not subject to and from which I derive no moral obligation, I believe you're incorrect. The argument you propose is certainly one possible and strong objection to the legal (rather than moral) obligation to view ads, it is by no means the only one. For instance, the absolute majority of the ToS you're defending here do not force visitors to explicitly agree to their terms before proceeding further. This overwhelmingly popular class of ToS was rendered largely unenforcable even in the U.S. by the precedent of Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, Inc. [1], and the legal argument had nothing to do with the ability of your average web surfer, but rather the lack of constructive notice on the part of the website. We can discuss other precedents if you like, as there are several, but it's clear that contrary to the picture you attempted to present, even in the U.S. legal system it is far from the case that browsing a website implies a contractual relationship with binding terms of service.
If you personally feel a moral obligation to watch ads on websites you visit, that's your business. I don't see any reasonable basis to your attempt to find a legal justification for your position, and you haven't presented any moral argument that didn't directly derive from an incorrect legal position. There are certainly moral arguments you could pursue and, although I haven't yet seen one that was even mildly persuasive, we can have that discussion as well.
I mostly agree with you. I'm not making arguments about the behavior of most websites - i'm taking a more abstract perspective.
> and the legal argument had nothing to do with the ability of your average web surfer, but rather the lack of constructive notice on the part of the website
Indeed, I also do not consider websites without constructive notice to have legally binding terms. I'm referring specifically to cases that do have constructive notice.
> but it's clear that contrary to the picture you attempted to present, even in the U.S. legal system it is far from the case that browsing a website implies a contractual relationship with binding terms of service.
Those terms are limited, but there are terms. That is my point. The existence of such a contract is limited, but not zero.
Okay, so you agree that in the absolute majority of cases users have no legal obligation whatsoever to watch ads, but you're interested in a hypothetical website that has constructive notice for terms of service that specifically include language which says users must watch ads. All right, let's discuss that.
In this case, even though the contract itself is enforcable, it does not necessarily follow that every clause is enforcable. Standard unilateral contract law restrictions apply. To the best of my knowledge, no comparable clause has ever been directly tested in a U.S. court, so we'll have to speculate. However, it is well established that certain types of clauses are invalid for reasons such as being unconscionable (compulsory arbitration clauses are a common example). The extent to which a website's terms of service can restrict your legal right to not download certain network packets or adjust how your browser interprets them is an open legal question, at least in the U.S. (I'm confident no such ToS would be upheld in the ECJ).
Furthermore, if we lived in the (in my opinion, dystopian) world you envision, what happens if due to, for instance, an ISP routing issue the third party advertisements you've "agreed to" aren't loaded onto your computer? Are you in breach of contract? And this is not even touching upon the question of whether a "legal obligation to watch" the content your browser actually displays in the end makes any sense (I don't really see how it could).
Also, while this is an amusing legal question to ponder, I continue to hold that the finer points of contract law in a particular jurisdiction don't really serve to illuminate any underlying moral questions.
> Okay, so you agree that in the absolute majority of cases users have no legal obligation whatsoever to watch ads, but you're interested in a hypothetical website that has constructive notice for terms of service that specifically include language which says users must watch ads. All right, let's discuss that.
I'm not sure exactly how hypothetical it is - I see websites doing this now. But yes, this is what i'm talking about.
> Furthermore, if we lived in the (in my opinion, dystopian) world you envision, what happens if due to, for instance, an ISP routing issue the third party advertisements you've "agreed to" aren't loaded onto your computer? Are you in breach of contract?
I think you can answer this question yourself :). This happens all the time in real world contracts. Some unforeseen, unspecified circumstances crop up, and an arbiter or judge decides whether and to what extent they fall under the existing terms. My personal opinion is that if this happened and it was a condition not explicitly spelled out in the terms, it would not be a breach. Because you basically acted in good faith, and factors beyond your control prohibited you from complying.
> Also, while this is an amusing legal question to ponder, I continue to hold that the finer points of contract law in a particular jurisdiction don't really serve to illuminate any underlying moral questions.
I agree, they don't. I think the basic moral principle is this: You create a thing. You say to the world "Hey world, i'll let you consume my thing, if you do this other thing". The world has the right to say "No thanks, we don't want your thing, because the other thing is too onerous". They do not have the right to say "The other thing is too onerous, but we're going to take your thing anyway, thanks."
> I think you can answer this question yourself :). This happens all the time in real world contracts. Some unforeseen, unspecified circumstances crop up, and an arbiter or judge decides whether and to what extent they fall under the existing terms. My personal opinion is that if this happened and it was a condition not explicitly spelled out in the terms, it would not be a breach. Because you basically acted in good faith, and factors beyond your control prohibited you from complying.
It's easy to invent more complex issues that render the enforcability of the contract suspect. For instance, I use NoScript. If your ToS notice relies on JS, as most of them do, I won't even see it. Have I agreed to the contract? What if my browser is configured in such a way that I can't see your ad, but I haven't specifically blocked it? Were the precise technical requirements explicitly stated in your ToS? If not, how would I even know how to comply? Even if your legal system recognizes such clauses, they are utterly unenforcable as a matter of fact, if not as a matter of law.
> I think the basic moral principle is this: You create a thing. You say to the world "Hey world, i'll let you consume my thing, if you do this other thing". The world has the right to say "No thanks, we don't want your thing, because the other thing is too onerous". They do not have the right to say "The other thing is too onerous, but we're going to take your thing anyway, thanks."
It's certainly a moral principle, but I doubt you'd find many people who would agree that principle supersedes every other consideration. Even in the crazy world of the U.S. legal system, copyrights and patents have limitations and expirations. If you create a thing and publish it, you certainly have a limited say in what happens to it, but you don't get to dictate terms in perpetuity and at whim, nor should you. In a society that prioritizes the rights of creators to the exclusion of everything else inventions have very little value.
In fact, one could argue that in the case of websites we care so (comparatively) little about the public interest precisely because most websites offer little of significant value.
> It's certainly a moral principle, but I doubt you'd find many people who would agree that principle supersedes every other consideration.
No, it most certainly doesn't. But the burden of proof is very clearly established to be on the side of those wanting to limit private property and contract rights. I see no proof of significant public interest in restricting this right.
> In fact, one could argue that in the case of websites we care so (comparatively) little about the public interest precisely because most websites offer little of significant value.
This is pretty clearly false. Plenty of websites offer enormous value. But even if it weren't, there's a feedback loop here. Content created is influenced by regulatory climate, just as regulatory climate is influenced by content created.
> EULAs are limited not by the fundamentals of the medium, but by the assumed ability of the customer to meaningfully agree to the terms.
You can't use a EULA to extend the term of your copyright. EULAs are quite definitely limited by far more than the "ability of the counter-party to understand and agree to the terms".
Thank you for the response, I found it illuminating. You seem to contradict yourself, though, you claim you view Tivo use as stealing but later you make a concession to my view:
> If the website does not say that you have to watch the ads to view the content, then i'd say that it's not stealing. Same with television, by the way.
I have never seen a TV program imply that I must watch the ads in exchange for consuming the content. Given this, how do you support your claim? Or are such messages common on television in your locality?
Also I have a follow up question for you: You say using the mute button during the ads qualifies as stealing (for the moment, let's assume the program has come with explicit terms requiring you to watch the ads), would you still consider it stealing if I had left the television muted for the entire show? Am I obliged to unmute the TV when the ads come on? Does the answer change if I have been selectively unmuting parts of the program (for instance if I was just interested in watching the daily doubles on Jeopardy)?
> I have never seen a TV program imply that I must watch the ads in exchange for consuming the content. Given this, how do you support your claim? Or are such messages common on television in your locality?
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I consider it stealing if and only if that agreement is made explicit. Most television channels i'm aware of do not do this. So fast forwarding / muting is not stealing. But in principle it could be, if they specifically requested that you not do it.
> Also I have a follow up question for you: You say using the mute button during the ads qualifies as stealing (for the moment, let's assume the program has come with explicit terms requiring you to watch the ads), would you still consider it stealing if I had left the television muted for the entire show? Am I obliged to unmute the TV when the ads come on? Does the answer change if I have been selectively unmuting parts of the program (for instance if I was just interested in watching the daily doubles on Jeopardy)?
This is an interesting question to explore. In some sense, you're consuming a fractional portion of the content (i.e. the visual portion), and you are consuming the same portion of the ads. So, there is some sense of symmetry there, which seems intuitively appealing as a standard to me. If I were adjudicating this personally, i'd say that seems acceptable, unless the terms of the content delivery explicitly forbid decoupling the audio/visual channel in this way.
> Sorry, I should have been more clear. I consider it stealing if and only if that agreement is made explicit. Most television channels i'm aware of do not do this. So fast forwarding / muting is not stealing. But in principle it could be, if they specifically requested that you not do it.
Well, your ethics seems to change in a matter of minutes, it's hard to follow.
> i'd say that seems acceptable, unless the terms of the content delivery explicitly forbid decoupling the audio/visual channel in this way.
> The litmus test for stealing here is breaking an agreement.
This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party.
> This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party.
Indeed this is the question. If you haven't meaningfully entered an agreement, then I don't believe you're obligated to abide this term. However, that's sort of the question. What constitutes entering an agreement? How explicit do they have to be exactly to make it enforceable? I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that there ought to be some standard by which you can be considered to have agreed to some sort of service-terms.
as a baseline, to constitute entering an agreement, each party must have a reasonable idea of what they are agreeing to, as well as the capacity (mental, emotional, physical, rational, etc) to actually make such an agreement. to enforce an agreement, it must be recognized that some term.has been broken by some party.
ad providers, as a collective (that is, no single actor is responsible by themselves, and not every actor is at fault) began breaking the terms of the implicit agreements with Pop-up ads, ads with sound, ads with visual motion, ads with full video, ads that look like real articles, ads that block actaul content from the website you are visiting, dishonest or misleading ads, targeted ads without the users consent, ads that are significantly louder than the video you are watching, ads that hijack your mouse, etc.
each of these phenomena were introduced after previous terms were implicitly agreed upon, that is, they were introduced without informing the user beforehand. and so, as a collective, ad providers have broken the agreement much more and morw often than users who wholesale block ads. in this moral economy then, the users have the high ground.
> I believe fundamentally that any content creator has the right to specify the terms by which their content is consumed. If one of those terms is 'watch the ads', then you are morally obligated to watch the ads.
And luckily there are plenty of content creators that don't think that way.
From my point of view advertisers pay to access channels where they believe their messages will have an impact. Presumably they will pay more for higher-impact channels and less for low-impact ones, it would be unreasonable for them to expect their message to have 100% consumer penetration. If people without technical expertise have chosen to package "valuable" content along with a low-impact advertising channel in a way where the ads can be trivially stripped and relying on these ads to be profitable I posit that these entities deserve to go out of business and stripping their ads is no more stealing than buying a gizmo from a company that has unwisely decided to offer their product for less than it cost to produce.