Is blocking ads theft of service?

Readers sometimes write to ask how a certain ad got onto my blog. You know, I don’t see any ads at all when I read my blog. Or anyone else’s blog. Or, basically, anything on the Internet at all. Now, how could that be?

Am I stealing because I avoid ads in all aspects of my life? I don’t think so. In fact, if a company forces me to watch an ad — this happens on airlines now, when you first board — I feel I should be paid for the experience. If you sell my work or my time in order to make money for yourself, my feeling is you’re stealing from me unless you compensate me satisfactorily.

---

But no, blocking ads is not theft of service unless seeing those ads is made an explicit condition of accessing some service. And if it is, I will probably not use that service or visit that site, just as I don’t watch commercial television any more (I stopped around 15 years ago).

A poor analogy on intellectual property rights

A friend sent me a link to Paul Graham’s recounting of the old story of the poor student who enjoyed the smell of fish cooking in the restaurant next door, and who was sued by the restaurant-owner, who claimed the student was stealing the smell of his food. Graham uses the story to suggest that intellectual property rights are subject to an evolving definition and implies (though he doesn’t say it in so many words) that they are evanescent.

But this is a poor analogy.

The owner of the shop is not selling smells; he is selling food and the smells escape freely from it, the same as from the food other people sell. He does not usually charge for smells or even, under normal circumstances, treat them as a commodity. There is no comparison to intellectual property (except perhaps to people who can’t tell the difference between creative work and the smell of cooked fish).

A better analogy would be if I bought your products and offered them as free gifts for new customers at my bank. I have the right to do that since I’ve paid for them. But I can’t pretend that there is no condition to be met in order to receive a gift, and I would be insincere if I said my entire goal was to distribute your products. But that is exactly what the advertising industry does by using Internet search results as a lure to expose us to targeted ads and subject us to data-mining. It is still possible to avoid the ads — you can use tools like Adblock Plus and you can conduct all your web-searches through a browser that doesn’t link searches to a known login (I like iCab for this purpose, while logged into accounts on more mainstream browsers).

Graham’s post is primarily about “labels and studios”, the high end of the entertainment business, which are a primary force behind the perpetual extension of copyright in the United States, the fictitious electronic security that is an increasing drag on our economy, and recent legal threats to end the freedom of the Internet. “Labels and studios” are easy to vilify. But the idea of intellectual property doesn’t belong to them, and not everyone who owns intellectual property is guilty of their excesses.

To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and provides tacit support to the huge, powerful technology/advertising companies that now treat the entire content of the Internet as a resource with which to make money.

I make all my work freely available on the internet, but it remains copyright and its use is not free in the sense “unencumbered”, even though it is free in the sense “freely accessible” and may be copied at will for individual reading and study. There’s a clear statement of this principle on the site. My feeling is that if you use my stuff to make money, you owe me a cut.

A less painful way to install Adblock Plus filter-subscriptions in Firefox

Adblock Plus, an “add-on” for current versions of the Firefox browser, is a powerful tool for suppressing advertising. After installing Firefox, you have the choice of installing any number of add-ons, and this is normally the very first one I do.

Adblock Plus uses filters to determine what is an ad. Finding filters, unless you write them yourself (a most tedious procedure), requires you to subscribe to existing lists. I subscribe to eleven in all, and I almost never see an ad — either graphic or text-based — when I use Firefox. It makes the Internet a liveable place for me.

But subscribing to filters is unpleasant because it requires many repetitive mouse-actions. A faster way is to create a file called patterns.ini containing only the following:

[Subscription]

url=~wl~

title=Exception Rules

defaults=whitelist

[Subscription]

url=~fl~

title=Ad Blocking Rules

defaults=blocking
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblockrules.org/download.php?type=all

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-adblocklist-addon.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity-Tracking.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-current-expanded.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-stats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/enhancedstats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok

(This is my own list, of course.) I save patterns.ini to the adblockplus directory, which is typically at a path something like this:

… Firefox/Profiles/<hash>.default/adblockplus/

where <hash> is a random-looking eight-digit alphanumeric sequence that identifies a given user profile to Firefox. (Each <hash>.default user profile needs its own set of Adblock Plus filters in the appropriate subdirectory.)

Then I go to Firefox and open the filter preference window for Adblock Plus. On OS X, that means Tools -> Adblock Plus -> Filter Preferences. In the bottom right corner of the window there is a checkbox marked “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”. If I click it, either to check or uncheck it, the filters in patterns.ini immediately repopulate from the URLs I have placed in the minimal file.

So it doesn’t seem to be necessary to go through the tedious manual installation method in order to get the filter subscriptions. I save a copy of the minimal patterns.ini file above in a normal directory for fast replacement if I need a new user profile for some reason.

---

The “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” option was introduced in v. 2 of Adblock Plus — in other words, it is recent. At the moment, only ads associated with two German sites, netzwelt.de and guruads.de, are involved, but surely this is the beginning of a much more pervasive trend, since advertising now funds most internet content, or so it appears to me. When I was a boy, all television was free as long as you had a TV set to receive it; apart from public broadcasting, it was paid for entirely with advertising. So I recognize the smell of this business model.