Newspapers Try To Stop Ad-blocking Browser Brave From 'Stealing Content' 112
New reader DarkLordBelial writes: The newspaper Association of America (NAA) has sent a letter to Brave Software, makers of the Brave browser, detailing how little they think of Brave's proposed solution. In the letter, NAA says Brave Software "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts." The letter suggests that replacing adverts with their own selected ads is no different to republishing the content and therefore copyright infringement. In response, Brave Software says all such assertions are false and that the NAA has misunderstood their business model. Founded by Mozilla's co-founder, Brave pays its users in bitcoin to watch ads. According to the company's plan, a website gets 55 percent of the money, whereas rest is distributed among users and Brave.
Meanwhile (Score:2)
Other browsers have ad-blocker add-ons
Re:Meanwhile (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, and adblockers are necessary to avoid my bandwidth being stolen by ads and the risk of malicious ads intruding on my computer.
Re:Meanwhile (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but it's one thing to skip past the commercials (ala Tivo) or block ads. It's another to replace them in their entirety.
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Re:Meanwhile (Score:4, Insightful)
Other browsers have ad-blocker add-ons
They're upset because he very well may have outsmarted them, and figured out a way for people to view ads. To be honest, if Brave is vetting ads, and paying me to watch them I'm likely going to give that a go, and with luck that'll be a perfectly fine solution to the current "OMG YOU'RE THIEVES" BS that sites are pushing, and the "OMG AD-BLOCKERS AM ARE THE DEVILS" that the advertising companies are pushing.
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It doesn't have an ad blocker, it has an ad replacer.
That's quite a different thing.
Well, they're not wrong (Score:3)
What the NAA published is ludicrous and disconnected from reality; but they're not wrong: if Brave actually did what they claim, it would be roughly akin to stealing their content just as if they'd copied it to their own server and republished it. It's like tying a string to a door and hooking up a shotgun, then trying to claim you didn't shoot them.
This is called a strawman argument: the NAA made up something easy to attack and used it to attack something defensible. Since what Brave actually does is actually a sort of partnership between publishers and the browser manufacturer, it's really fucking hard to trample down.
If you want to attack Brave, attack it on grounds of being an unsustainable business model.
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It would be worse than copying it, actually, since the newspapers' own servers would be used to serve the content, with associated maintenance costs.
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No, the NAA is wrong, and Brave explain why they're wrong quite clearly and elegantly. You should read their rebuttal, it's quite good. Duck arguments don't work legally, and for good reason. It's nothing like tying a string to a door etc. No republication is happening. I repeat, no republication is happening. Reformatting content on a client is not republishing. Publishers might not like it (the whole thing sounds like a scam to me) but the republishing argument has no weight, legally or morally.
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Reformatting content on a client is technically a reproduction of a copyrighted work, isn't it? Back many years ago, a court case, Mai System Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993), led to an exception being added to U.S. Code title 17 that allows users to create temporary copies of computer programs in memory as long as that duplication was an essential step in the utilization of the program.
Surely the same kind of theory would apply to a client downloading and temporarily storing the c
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It's a Game Genie for the Internet (Score:2)
It's a derivative work, but courts are more likely to find a derivative work to be fair use if said derivative work is not stored permanently nor distributed to the public. See for example Galoob v. Nintendo.
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What Brave does is no different than if someone picked up a copy of a newspaper and taped their own ads over the existing ads before handing the paper to you for perusal.
They have a partnership with the newspaper, and pay them part of the revenue.
Suggestion (Score:4, Interesting)
How about an add blocker with the following properties... 1: It only accepts adds on the right ( or left, user selectable ) margin, and 2: it only accepts adds up to a user selectable total size. A web site could send down 5 small adds or one big add or get blocked part way through a really big add. This would give the advertisers an incentive to create less irritating and smaller adds and the web site could charge more for being one of the first adds to be sent to the user.
Re:Suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha ha ha (Score:5, Informative)
NAA says Brave Software "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts."
Lol, wat?
Seriously, is this grasping at imaginary straws, or what? Let's be clear here: what I do with MY browser on MY internet connection is MY business, not yours. If I choose not to display certain content or (GASP) swap it for other content, that's MY choice and is not reason to try and drag anyone into court.
Then:
Users: hey can you give us less intrusive and annoying ads
Advertisers: screw you here is your ad
Now:
Advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: screw you
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Advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: screw you
Actually it went more like this...
Forbes: Please disable your adblocker
Me: 127.0.0.1 forbes.com www.forbes.com
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Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking (Score:5, Informative)
Forbes straight up admits that it treats Firefox's "Open Link in New Private Window" as an ad blocker. Because Forbes doesn't do privacy, I don't do Forbes.
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this makes perfect sense to me; IE: no privacy, I don't support or surf to it. Perfect Sense. ... so let's image that they clean that up
what does not make sense is how a publisher should be denied revenue.
everyone will hit me with the malware issue
then what's the excuse?
original content needs some sort of revenue.
The race towards paying for nothing and getting everything for free seems somewhat out of sync with me.
I think I am living in the most interesting time of history. I look forward to the next 50 yea
Re:Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking (Score:4, Interesting)
>original content needs some sort of revenue.
Fine. Do subscriptions, or "ad fewer" like Wonkette does or convince your users to whitelist you, like FARK does (they also do subscriptions, so Drew can pay for his Maker's Mark).
>The race towards paying for nothing and getting everything for free seems somewhat out of sync with me.
It's not about paying nothing anymore. Users are quite happy to fork over money for subscriptions (hulu, netflix, amazon prime, etc) for content if it's at a decent price and not a fucking "MINE ALL THE USERS" for demographics. And when a subscription is paid for, if you promise no ads, don't do ads like the cable channels have done with bait-and-switch over the decades.
If you want to rely on ads instead of subscriptions, that's your own decision and not the users'. The users get the final say in what they display on their own terminals. Not you. If this isn't what you want, then change your damn business model.
I block ads because they are a security risk. When the ad industry finally decides to come up with some fucking standards that treat the users with respect, I'll stop blocking. But that is highly unlikely, because the ad industry and the dweebs that hire them are rapacious assholes.
They've thrown dead goats down this well for well on 20 years. Sorry, you guys fucked up, and you are no longer tolerated. Go. Away.
inb4 "but the ads pay for the free content"
if you can't convince your users to subscribe or whitelist you, then your content isn't really all that worth it, is it?
--
BMO
A year of Amazon Prime for one episode (Score:3)
Fine. Do subscriptions
Most people are unwilling to buy a year's subscription just to read one article [blockadblock.com]. So how do you "Do subscriptions" without turning away users who arrive through citations in search, social media, or other aggregators?
or convince your users to whitelist you
Good luck with that when these sites insist on allowing cross-site interest-based advertising and proprietary JavaScript.
Users are quite happy to fork over money for subscriptions (hulu, netflix, amazon prime, etc) for content if it's at a decent price
Then let me draw an analogy: Paying for a year of Amazon Prime to watch one episode is likely not "at a decent price".
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It's not that a single site has only one article, but that one article is the only article that a particular user desires to view. Consider using a search engine to find ten different articles, but they're all on different sites, each of which requires the user to pay for a year's subscription. Or how many times do you think you'd Read The Featured Article linked from a Slashdot story if you had to buy a separate year's subscription for each domain?
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You wrote two replies. One to me and one to fropenn. I will combine my reply into one long post, so please excuse the length.
>>subscriptions
>Most people are unwilling to buy a year's subscription just to read one article So how do you "Do subscriptions" without turning away users who arrive through citations in search, social media, or other aggregators?
Lots of places have a number of free articles per month that users can read, most of the time 10 or 20. Then you are encouraged to buy a subscri
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Your analogy fails when Netflix and Hulu are month-to-month for the price of a couple of Starbucks Chai-Latte-GMOFree-Organic-Vanilla-Salted-Caramel-instant-weight-gain-heart-attack-diabetes-in-a-cup.
$10 to rent one episode is still a little much, especially when the particular single episodes that you want to watch are spread out across Netflix, Hulu, and what have you, and there is little if any syndication among these sites.
Your analogy also fails that there /are/ ways to buy individual articles as e-books. As a matter of fact, paying by the article was pioneered by the scientific journals /three decades ago/.
And I imagine that most people are unwilling to pay $35 per article, which I've gathered is the going rate for articles in closed-access peer-reviewed journals, for things that aren't articles in peer-reviewed journals. They certainly won't pay that much for random news articles f
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Then let me draw an analogy: Paying for a year of Amazon Prime to watch one episode is likely not "at a decent price".
Amazon also lets you pay for individual episodes. In fact, they have a lot more things available as pay-per-view than on Prime. iTunes, Google Play, etc. also use that business model, and they seem to be doing fine with it.
This hasn't worked as well for reading articles, mainly because of the lack of a good standard for micropayments. But that could be solved if the industry decided to get serious about it.
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Webpass.io reminds meo fo Adult Check (Score:2)
The last time someone tried federated subscription, it was called Adult Check [wikipedia.org], run by a company called Cybernet. I guess the name meant "You're an adult; you can pay for nice things now." But one problem with Adult Check's business model was that as a payment processor, it was vulnerable to accusations of vicarious copyright infringement. When participating publishers included infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10 magazine on their sites, the publisher of Perfect 10 successfully sued, and as far
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everyone will hit me with the malware issue ... so let's image that they clean that up
then what's the excuse?
Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Which is a very short bridge, since many sites aren't responsible with the amount and/or placement of ads (see: Wikia).
Re:Forbes treates Firefox privacy as ad blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I run the best script for grease monkey plugin ever.
Adblock Detector Blocker for Grease monkey.
You can watch Hulu ad free, have zero ad or paywalls anymore on news sites. Read the entire new York times without paywall pop-up.
Grease monkey with adblock detector blocker
Ublock adblocker
No script
3 greatest plugins ever to enjoy a web like it was when I was working for isp in 1993+ erases social media and ads from the net and unlinks all sites from each other via social and analytics sits, blocks statcounter, Google analytics, Alexia, etc.
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Forbes is one of the few sites for which I do end up disabling ad blocking.
Are you fucking insane? Forbes served malware masquerading as adverts. Now they want you disable your protection against such fuckwittery and you'd gleefully complying?
Could you share some contact details, I'd like to know where to send the men in white coats.
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Yep. For me it's:
Forbes: Please disable your adblocker
Me: (clicks on Close Window button)
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Not everything is in a typical RSS feed (Score:2)
RSS includes the headline and perhaps the first sentence, not the entire article, I assume.
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How about this: Brave can be viewed as illegal and deceptive, as long as the executives of every company that has either created, paid for, or distributed an advert that had psychologists involved in its design goes to prison.
Or if the executives of every company that has either created, paid for, or distributed an advert that infects my computer is willing to pay for the entire cost of cleanup and data recovery, including punitive damages as well as compensation for pain and suffering, lost business, emotional trauma and whatever else my lawyers can dream up. Then I'll view their ad-laden pages.
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Advertisers: screw you here is your malware
FTFY
should have thought this one through... (Score:4, Interesting)
E-z way to block graphical ads (Score:1)
Use a screen-reader for the blind. At worst, they graphical ad will be replaced by text read off in robo-tone by my computer.
Oh wait, now the newspapers will claim that screen-reading software is illegal too since it blocks the pictures of the ads.
--
Seriously, back in the last century, I browsed "with images disabled" mostly for speed reasons, but it had the nice side-effect of blocking most ads.
Sue the bastards under the ADA (Score:2)
Oh wait, now the newspapers will claim that screen-reading software is illegal too since it blocks the pictures of the ads.
Then report said newspapers to disability advocates in the appropriate jurisdiction. If worse comes to worst, they'll bring a lawsuit alleging disability discrimination, as the (U.S.) National Federation of the Blind did to Target [wikipedia.org].
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A screen reader is a performance... Making them pay is a job for ASCAP
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Copyright law does not prohibit private performances, like a screen reader. It prohibits public performances.
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It prohibits public performances.
So, I can't use my computer at Starbucks or in the park where somebody might hear it? Obviously a rhetorical question, since I would use headphones to avoid being a nuisance. But it would be interesting to hear 50 chattering computers in the same room, but amongst them would probably be some damn RIAA lawyer that will sue.
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Sorry, but I'm not a lawyer, and can't usefully argue about the fine points. There may be case law involved.
Memo to the NAA: (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly: We really don't want your shitty content that much, either.
Third: You're like dinosaurs stuck in a tarpit; all these wailings, whingings, and whinings about your 'ad revenue' and how us ad-blocker users are 'stealing your content' is just your death-song.
Do you want to survive? Stop saturating us with shitty ads. Get a sense of scale and apropriateness. We're not going to pay attention to your ads anyway, but at least we won't block them if they're not playing video, flashing, doing shitty animations, popping up in our faces, or otherwise being annoying to the point where we want to punch the screen.
Also, while I've got your attention: Stop tracking us. We hate that shit. It's at least half the reason we block your shitty ads in the first place.
Get correct, or get extinct. Choice is yours.
Sincerely,
The Internet
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Dear Brave Browser:
First and foremost: We don't want your shitty ads.
Secondly: We really don't want your shitty percentage of bitcoin that much, either.
Third: You're like vultures hovering over the dinosaurs stuck in a tarpit; all these wailings, whingings, and whinings about your 'ad revenue' and how us ad-blocker users are 'stealing your content' is just your death-song.
Do you want to surviv
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The rules should be much, much simpler and easier to enforce on a technical level: only allow PNG and JPEG images, with a file size limit for each standard banner size.
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Doesn't that mean they have no copyright on the page as a whole, but only on what they provide? If the picked the ads themselves, they'd have some claim that the whole page was a creative effort on their part (US copyright law sets a low bar on creativity required), but that isn't the case for most newspapers.
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Even on the internet they put a lot of effort into evaluating advertising. They do it to maximize revenue and find new ways to tick people with ads disguised as content. They have entire divisions whose job is just to maximize online ad revenue. Just like they have teams whose job is just to manage their social media accounts.
When they serve up malware it's because they had the staff but decided to direct their efforts to profit rather than the safety of their readers.
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Yes they can. They can do it by not using a bunch of proprietary JavaScript that does a bunch of Cross Site Scripting to sell the user's screen space at the absolute last second as the page loads. This is how things used to work before the advertisers got analytics hungry and started serving up personalized ADs. Also this would get rid of the driveby malware infections that some of these AD networks are guilty of serving
Re:Memo to the NAA: (Score:4, Interesting)
You're like dinosaurs stuck in a tarpit; all these wailings, whingings, and whinings about your 'ad revenue' and how us ad-blocker users are 'stealing your content' is just your death-song.
The title intentionally misquotes the NAA letter for sensationalism. Brave intends to replace publisher ads with their own. The NAA said "Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website.". They technically said "use our content" in reference to what was happening and then compared it to and offline form of what would be theft.
All that aside, the whole argument about copyright infringement vs theft is that you're not depriving them of their original work or material gain from it. For Brave's plan to work, it would be doing exactly that. And yes, Brave has stated the intend to pay publishers a share of the profit on Brave's terms, all without publisher agreement. On what planet does that work, walk into a business, set my terms and they have to recourse but to accept? If Brave's plan is so great, they can do what others do and sell it and get a consenting agreement first.
Ads aren't content (Score:2)
One of my first jobs was delivering advertising tear sheets for a small town newspaper.
You didn't make that. The news is the news. Ads are not the news.
Maybe if ads didn't obscure half of our iPhone screen space and not go away when we try to read stuff, we wouldn't need to ad-block it. Especially the ones that autoplay.
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FWIW, I installed an ad blocker on my iPhone because I could no longer use a lot of sites. It was not possible to scroll reliably without accidentally touching ad space and being sent off to another site. If any site decides it isn't going to serve me content because of that, fine, that's their right.
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Corporations aren't People.
They don't have free speech.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Billboards (Score:2)
In the early half of the 20th century there was a huge push to stop highway billboard advertising. They are ugly and block your view of the countryside. Notice how that ended up.
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There are some areas without billboard advertising. Go visit Seattle some time and marvel at the total lack of outdoor advertising.
Fortune blocks ad blockers (Score:2)
Fortune added an add blocker detector. As a result, I never read Fortune articles anymore, or share them with any friends. Clearly this was their intention, and it worked.
I guess that tells me that I don't need their content. That likely proves true for every web site on the internet.
Dear NAA: (Score:2)
Instead of yanking unsupported hypotheticals out of your cavernous ass and pretending they have some value (other than entertainment), how's about you hitch up your teensy tiny bollocks and actually take Brave to court and actually have a judge say that.
Oh, wait, that's right. You have just enough functional brain cells to understand that you'll actually lose. Humiliatingly, in fact.
Keep barking, yappy dog. Your teensy tiny teeth intimidate no one, and
If you own the content, you own the malware. (Score:2)
It sounds like to me that the newspapers are taking ownership of the ad content. If so, that means they get to take ownership of the malware that is part of the ad content.
Brave is Not New (Score:2)
Contact (Score:2)
Maybe newspapers are losing for other reasons. (Score:1)
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To catch a fish, to catch a fish, to catch a fucking fissssssssh
Because modern fish fishers know that only fishy fish can catch fish, not luddite non-fish shit.
Fish!
Was this a First Flounder?