But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion.

A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).

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opello 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business that paid for the ad?

In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.

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Nextgrid 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.

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danpalmer 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is a line.

Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.

	▲	sidrag22 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		depriving? the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite. the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads. and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.

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jemmyw 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not piracy. You might have a problem with it ethically. But you're not breaking copyright laws by blocking ads.

Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?

When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?