It’s not like a house in any way. It’s you fooling someone into giving something for free when they’ve categorically stated the price of reading their content is taking it with the ads. Sort of like you are paying with counterfeit money or a rubber check.
No, it’s exactly like a house. You can put any conditions you want on me coming inside. But you can’t say “You’re not allowed to look at my house from the street unless you’re dressed in all black”. I mean, you can say that, but I’m under no obligation to do what you say. Put a wall up if you don’t want people to see the outside of your house. Don’t put your valuables out on the front lawn. Lock them up inside, where the people you allow inside can be vetted and agree to your terms in return for seeing them.
But if I pick the lock to your house I’m allowed in then under your reasoning. I just fooled your lock so that’s your problem.
No. I made a clear distinction between breaking in and viewing publicly accessible information. Let’s make this a little clearer:
Your house has some nice artwork on the siding facing the street. But you can’t see it without special glasses. You’ve hoped that people would stop by your house, pay you for a pair of special glasses, and view the artwork, and you could earn income from it.
But it turns out those glasses aren’t so special after all. Anybody can make them for free, or pay pennies for a pair from the dollar store down the street. This complicates your plans to monetize your ‘invisible’ painting, so you put a sign up that says “Do not look at my house unless you’ve bought a pair of glasses from me, the homeowner”.
I mean, lots of people might feel guilty and buy $5 glasses from you instead of the ten cent glasses from the dollar store, to reward you for putting your effort into making art on your siding. But no one is obligated to. The outside of your house is publicly visible, and anyone who has the right glasses can see it, regardless of your wishes.
Conversely, if you made the same “invisible” artwork, but it’s a mural in your living room instead, you can put all sorts of restrictions on who or how people view it. Only people who buy your special glasses at a large markup can enter. Or maybe you sell a pamphlet about your artistic process that people have to buy before you’ll let them see your art. Or maybe you just don’t like motorcycle drivers, so you don’t allow them to see your art under any circumstances.
The distinction is that, when you keep your valuable information private, you can place any restrictions you want on who or how it is accessed. When it is public, as the internet is, you’re left with fewer options. This is not about breaking into anything. It is about viewing publicly accessible information.
Oh yes that convoluted and tortured analogy made things much clearer.
Are you familiar with facebook? Anybody can read publicly posted statuses and see publicly posted pictures. But you have to have an account and permission of the poster to see content they have posted that wasn’t public.
Or the SDMB itself. This is a public forum. Anybody can read our posts. There are some message boards that aren’t publicly visible. If someone complained about you reading their SDMB posts, their only recourse would be to stop posting on this board. I can’t stop you from viewing my public posts. If I don’t want you to see it, I do not post it publicly.
What we’re dealing with here is a publisher like the New York Times trying to have it both ways. They want their content to be searchable via Google, and that requires it to be public. But they also want to restrict how people view their content, or who views it. But they simply can’t. They can make their content subscription only, alienating a lot of readers and making their content unsearchable, but nevertheless controlling who accesses it and how, or they can post it publicly and accept that people are going to access it however they want. It’s a trade-off – their trade off, not mine. But as long as their content is public, they can’t put any restrictions on how I access it.
Or rather, they can make a wishlist of restrictions if they want. But the public has no obligation to honor those restrictions as long as the information is still publicly available.
I am not sure about whether your assertion is true. I think people may indeed be obliged to honour restrictions that the content provider stipulates. Besides the idea of an implied contract, it’s possible circumvention of an Ad Wall violates law under the DMCA. I started a GD thread asking about that.
No, it’s more like they are demanding that you go into a store without a protective mask when they freely let it be filled with poisonous gases. I have no obligation to let them poison me, any more than I have an obligation to let them infect my computer, steal my bandwith, or sell information on me.
As I said earlier, one of the consistent features of this argument is how the common people have an “obligation” to let the corporations exploit them, while the corporations have no obligations at all. I have an “obligation” to let them wreck my computer or steal my bank password and they have none.
It’s entirely one sided; it’s the predators demanding that their victims just take passively sit there and take it like good prey.
So don’t visit their website. Sheesh. They aren’t breaking into your house with a thumbdrive full of malware.
No, they are transmitting it down wires into my house instead. And claiming I have some kind of moral obligation to *let *them.
Some moderately related news: Using Adblock Plus to block ads is legal, rules German court
*As a blog post by Adblock Plus’s Ben Williams explains, the court found that there is no contract between publishers and visitors to websites as a result of which users have “agreed” to view all the ads a publisher serves. “To the contrary, said the court, users have the right to block those or any ads, because no such contract exists,” Williams writes. “Additionally, the judge ruled that by offering publishers a way to serve ads that ad-blocking users will accept, the Acceptable Ad initiative provides them an avenue to monetise their content, and therefore is favourable, not disadvantageous, to them.”
In a significant rebuke to the company behind Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich regional court said that “the law does not exist to save or uphold publishers’ business model(s). Rather, according to the ruling, it is up to them to innovate.”*
Of course it’s only Germany and all that, but there you go. Whether any of that translates to the US remains to be seen. Then again, it may be that this stuff never makes it to court in the first place.