this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Piracy I associate as an illegal act that carries penalties of fines and imprisonment. Like real piracy...
As blocking is legal and something even the FBI recommends. This is more a website shortcoming than an act of piracy. Which if blocking ads is piracy then at that point the word just becomes diluted, and at that point who even cares.
Isn't "taking something without paying" what piracy is? With YouTube, the "payment" is your time spent watching an ad. If you bypass that "payment", are you not effectively pirating the content?
It doesn't seem that diluted to me. I actually agree with Linus's take that adblocking is piracy. It's just a much more socially and legally-acceptable form of piracy.
If anything, I feel like adblocking on YouTube does even more direct damage to content creators than pirating blockbuster movies does to movie studios, honestly. If ten thousand people pirate a new Marvel movie, Disney's not going to hurt too bad from that. But if ten thousand people adblock a YouTuber, that can significantly hurt their income by damaging their ad impression ranking. Advertisers on YouTube set their rates based on the engagement they get from a channel, and drops in engagement will typically result in drops in CPM.
It's the reason I pay for YouTube Premium, myself. I use YouTube pretty much all day long, and I want the creators whose content I spend my day watching to get paid for their work. And if not for YTP, I would 100% be adblocking YouTube, otherwise.
It's not illegal to look away from a billboard or to close my eyes during a trailer at the movies, which seems more akin to using an adblocker in a browser.
"Not acknowledging" and "directly interfering with" something are two different things.