I’ve never been a member of the “information wants to be free” club. That’s because I create content (this stuff you’re reading), and as much as I choose not to monetize it by putting advertisements on SJ, though there is the donate button on the sidebar, it pisses me off when someone else decides to take my content, put it on their website and make money off it. I give it for free. You don’t get to steal my content so you can make money. Is that wrong of me?
At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes about a new browser called Brave.
Brave is a new experimental browser from Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. It comes with a built-in ad-blocker that only blocks third party ads, and replaces them with non-tracking ads from its own inventory, whose revenue is then shared with publishers and users, on better terms than most ad networks give.
If my understanding is correct, Brave takes OPC (“other people’s content”), strips out the advertising that the original source of the content uses, and replaces it with its own advertising. There is one additional aspect, but it needs to be addressed separately, that the revenue from the replaced ads are “shared with publishers and users.”
For obvious and self-serving reasons, one can understand why users would love that. Instead of finding themselves in the constant position of having to suffer advertising to enjoy the internet, they would get something out of it. And publishers too? Well, that’s not as simple.
Users went from getting nothing to getting something. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right? But publishers? That’s a different issue. Publishers have the authority to make their own decisions as to whether, and with whom, what, for how much, etc., to monetize. That’s their right. There is the money issue, of course, but there is also the nature of the advertisement issue. Would I want someone putting ads for scumbag lawyers on SJ? Why no. No I would not.
But it’s not important why the publisher is against this, even if Brave is so beneficent as to share revenues. It’s the publisher’s right to do, not Brave’s.
17 members of the Newspaper Publishers of America published a damning letter this morning, called Brave “blatantly illegal” and a “plan to steal content.”
Is this “stealing”? Brendan Eich says no.
Browsers do not just play back recorded pixels from the publishers’ sites. Browsers are rather the end-user agent that mediates and combines all the pieces of content, including third-party ads and first-party publisher news stories. Web content is published as HTML markup documents with the express intent of not specifying how that content is actually presented to the browser user. Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.
If it were the case that Brave’s browsers perform “republication”, then so too does Safari’s Reader mode. The same goes for any browser with an ad-blocker extension installed, or the Links text-only browser, or screen readers for the visually impaired.
Cory Doctorow agrees.
This is a critical distinction. Eich’s assertions of legitimacy turn on the idea that users get to decide what their computers do with the bits that newspapers send. This isn’t just an important technical principle, it’s an important moral one, too, one that resonates with questions of privacy and property.
Technical, perhaps, but moral? Let’s test that thesis. Eich’s rationalization is that anything tech can accomplish is fair game, which is not exactly an outlier concept among geeks. And there is a certain merit to the fact that those of us who utilize the internet as a medium recognize that our pixels are subject to the same rules of the game as anyone else’s.
The internet is there, free, for us to take advantage of as a transmission medium, and so we have no cause to complain that the same magic that allows our content to spread across the internet may well come back to bite our best laid plans in the butt. But…
The newspapers are upset that Brave plans to make money from their material, and Eich says he will share it with them, and they say, no, we want to be masters of our own destiny. You have to make a deal with us, not force one on us. It’s easy to sympathize with this position, but for the newspapers’ ideas to have legal — rather than moral — force, they’d have to establish that users aren’t free to change how their browsers display the material they receive. This is a disastrous outcome — and a legally dubious one.
No. Not legally. Not morally. Technically, perhaps, but that’s as far as it goes. What is missing here is that the argument goes from one step, the tech ability to strip advertisements from content, the ad block piece, to a second step, the replacement of the publisher’s ads with Brave’s ads. Cory conflates steps one and two, as if they were the same. They’re not.
While users certainly have the ability to control how their browsers display content, and arguably have the right to accept or reject the condition that the content comes with strings attached, those strings being advertisements so the nice folks who create the content that users enjoy can, you know, eat, this isn’t about users.
This is about another business, an enterprise whose model is based on taking another person’s content, the stuff they worked to create, or were paid to create, and use it for their own purposes (that being, to make money on their terms). This isn’t to be anti-capitalism. I’m a total capitalist. But the fact that someone has the ability to pick a lock, sneak into someone else’s warehouse and steal their goods doesn’t make it a moral imperative that they be allowed to sell them as if they were their own.
So no, Brave is not okay, nor is it an affront to computer user agency. It’s just plain old theft of content, replacing the rightful publisher’s ability to monetize with its own. This is stealing content, not user agency. And to the extent anyone who believes that “information wants to be free” thinks his rights are at issue, they’re not. Brave is built on a business model of theft. Your user rights have nothing to do with it.
H/T Nathan Burney
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Id this any different than ad-blocking software, generally? In terms of removing profit from content creators?
The “removing profit” is the first step, the one that is the price for someone seeking profit through the use of a medium they didn’t create and don’t own. There is a sound argument that this, too, is a problem, as the content comes at a price, that being suffering the advertisements that keep the content flowing. It’s a debatable proposition.
What’s not debatable is the second step, replacing their profit with someone else’s profit.
Ad-blocker software has been removing the advertising content for quite a while. Almost as long, they’ve been requesting money from people so that every time a content creator creates a smarter mouse that can get through their trap, they can afford to re-create a better mousetrap.
I don’t know how much ad-blocking software has brought in via donations, but I’d wager it’s substantial.
This isn’t likely to change anytime soon and content makers are adapting accordingly.
Now comes Brave, wrapped in altruistic intentions (if you buy the hype). But is it doing much more than what its predecessors have done, just super sized?
At least it’s easier to see.
Did you need me to repeat myself using smaller words?
No
Is it theft if you still possess what you claim to be stolen? Is copyright infringement theft? Is it something other than theft when someone takes what you have published and modifies it for presentation? Is it the users doing the modification with a tool they have chosen to use? Or, is it the other ad network (Brave, in this case) highjacking the published content and modifying your copyrighted material? What about the ISPs who offer free or reduced price services if the user allows a banner ad they provide to run across the top of the browser while they are surfing the web? Is this also theft? Copyright infringement? Modifying content displayed differently than what was published? I am not smart enough in this area to have an answer. And I can only begin to think of the most basic questions this brings to mind. Very good article. Makes me think, question, discuss with others. Thank you.
Let’s deal with your first question, as that’s the one raised by the “information wants to be free” advocates: Is it theft if you still possess what you claim to be stolen?
Of course it is. Theft isn’t limited to physical things. Anything, tangible or otherwise, can be stolen. What flows through all of this is opportunity. Create anything, and it’s yours to exploit, whether it’s a physical item or an idea. This isn’t only because of the incentive to create, but because we get to enjoy the fruits of our efforts, which is a core precept of a capitalist society. All the other arguments/questions are rationalizations to circumvent the core question, which is: if you want to exploit something, come up with something worthy of exploitation. If you can’t, you lose. You don’t get to take what someone else created because you lack the capacity to do it for yourself.
From a historical perspective theft has required loss of the asset by the owner. The entire idea of copyright has never been about the loss of the content to the copyright holder but about the idea that only the holder can make copies of the work.
What the new browser is sign of is that technologically the copyright holder is screwed because the copyright holder doesn’t control the medium of distribution. This means the copyright holder doesn’t has many options in restricting distribution to a medium that allows monetization solely by the copyright holder. Given that copyright is a legal means of artificially making a work more scarce to economically benefit the holder, it is very questionable as to wether copyright will continue to be a useful monetization strategy for creators going forward.
Now yes if content creators can’t buy food you will run out of content creators and thus new works. However, I am under the impression that a shift is happening where the classical methods of paying content creators like advertising revenue and other ways that pay creators on more of a per work basis won’t be as profitable for the creator as more direct subscription or support models like paetreon will be.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
This is a law blog. You know, lawyers, judges, that sort of thing? I would suggest you find whoever told you about the law and call him a mean name for making you look stupid.
If I understand your argument correctly you are arguing that the ad revenue is being stolen by Brave. I won’t disagree with you that Brave is not allowing the copyright holder to monetize their content as they see fit. However, by that same rationale, an adblocker is stealing ad revenue as well, because the copyright holder doesn’t get the chance to make ad revenue from the user of the ad blocker either. At that point trying to distinguish between the two is irrelevant, which is something that as I understand your line of reasoning you are doing.
No, you don’t understand the argument. Not even a little bit.
Ad networks are often the delivery system for malware. Is a publisher negligent when one serves malware, or more generally for incorporating code into its content known to sometimes cause harm to an end user’s computer? Do end users have any legal right to prevent malware installation while using the published content?
An interesting question as to a publisher’s negligence, but not the issue addressed here. As to whether “end users have any legal right to prevent malware installation while using the published content,” that’s the ad block step, also not the issue here. Focus is hard.
You are very, very wrong about this. The right analogy is a service that comes to your house and replaces ads from your delivered newspapers. That analogy removes technology from the picture and exposes the legality and morality of what Brave is doing. Your contention is that I could not hire someone to do that for me, because whoever I hired would be monetizing OPC. Horsehockey.
[Note: to be a perfect analogy, the newspaper would lose revenue when this took place, so imagine that there’s some guy standing behind my armchair, looking over my shoulder, and watching which ads I read so he can pay the newspaper or ad replacement service as appropriate. That makes the analogy weird, but highlights just how creepy the whole online ad industry is in the first place.]
[Also, the newspaper is delivered for free. In fact, I keep tripping over the damn thing every time I go out to my mailbox. Perhaps it’s one of those local rags that essentially exist solely as a medium for advertising delivery. There, now the analogy is ringing pretty darned true.]
Your contention is, I believe, that the publishers are giving away their content for free /conditional/ on me displaying their ads on my screen, and thus if I read their content without displaying their ads I am going back on my end of the deal. I /suspect/ the law doesn’t support this argument, in that I don’t recall agreeing to any such deal – not even a EULA – but of course I defer to you when it comes to the law (but I’d appreciate it if you’d discuss this point).
As for the moral argument: If someone says “Here, take this for free, but please display this ad” I’m going to take what they’ve offered and politely decline their request. I don’t see any moral objection to doing so. If they say “Please take this for free, in exchange for agreeing to display this ad” – well, NOW they’re proposing a deal. If I take the deal, then I’m morally obligated to uphold my end. If I turn down the deal, I’m morally obligated not to take their content if those were the only terms they offered it under.
But there is no deal on the table here for any of the sites we’re discussing. Maybe in time they’ll start trying to couch their offers and requests in terms of agreements and obligations. Good luck, can’t wait to see how that turns out.
So, no. Until I agree to display ads on my screen in exchange for receiving their content, NOT displaying their ads just because they send me their content is NOT stealing their content, and paying someone else to help me not display their ads is NOT monetizing their content.
They just wish it were.
Eddie, you ignorant slut. My issue isn’t with the ad block step, but replacing the ads step. As for your analogy, you left out that the newspaper was delivered by space aliens.
Though, you’re view kinda ignores the publisher’s quid pro quo. It’s not all about you. There is a perfectly reasonable argument that when you go to their content (remember, they don’t put a gun to your head and force you to put their pixels on your screen), you take it as it comes. You may not like that argument, but that’s because you prefer to control your screen while enjoying someone else’s effort. So you’re a commie, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The replacing the ads step is legitimate IF it’s legitimate for me to remove the ads myself. The one is a consequence of the other.
If adblocking is legitimate, then it’s legitimate for me to have someone else do it for me as a service, and then legitimate for me to compensate them for that service, and legitimate for that compensation to be rendered in the form of agreeing to display ads of their choosing on my screen.
You miserable failure.
No (miserable failure though I may be). But I do admire your seamless slide down the slippery slope of logic.
If walking into a watch store and saying “sorry, sir, I won’t be buying anything” is legitimate, then it’s legitimate for me to invite the guy selling $15 Rolexes on the sidewalk to come inside and make himself at home, and then legitimate for me to get a cut of the take for letting him sell out of the premises.
I’m a fool, and a fool with a cold at that, but it seems to me if you’re gonna make a simplistic analogy, do it right.
If you, the content creator, arrange for ads to be displayed, you’re forging a link to an ad provider to monetize your stuff. When your users block the ads, they’re not forging a link of their own – they’re declaring the value of their eyeballs to be nil. Fine.
But use Brave and you’re grafting on an unauthorized link, one between content you didn’t create and an ad provider the content creator didn’t hire. Unlike with the ad blocker, you’re declaring that your eyeballs have value. You’re giving that value to, and taking a kickback from, someone who’s trading off something that isn’t his, in a place where he isn’t authorized to sell.
If you use an ad blocker, you’re arguably a parasite. Use Brave and you’re a thief.
“You may not like that argument, but that’s because you prefer to control your screen while enjoying someone else’s effort” That doesn’t equate to someone being a commie. It means as the copyright holder you have lost the ability to force the consumer to consume your content in the manner that you see fit. Content consumption on the internet is a buyer’s market. In a buyer’s market, the buyer has a lot more say than the producer. You can get upset about the shift from a producer’s to a buyer’s market. You aren’t going to affect it, though.
You’re new here. If you want to reply, use the reply button. You’re not special.
Sorry, I did hit the wrong button. There.
This is my favorite comment of yours so far. You’re getting better.
This is gibberish.
This is the child’s fantasy vision of online content. Let it go. He’s a believer, and gibberish is what they spew.
If they ever produced anything, they might possibly have a grasp. Instead they spew gibberish to rationalize their freedom to steal. Morons.
Not morons. Children. It’s different.
Still buying if you are selling…
P.S. Just imagine how much free time you will have to make up polls over at that uptown site when you sell SJ. You know you will have a shit ton more fun when you can write that percolating content stuff and have me, your new publisher, and my intern slaves deal with all the BS. And all those fucking emails…you know you don’t want to read all those damn emails people send you before 98.575 percent of them are trashed or politely responded to by your publisher.
I do produce content myself, thank you. I just don’t have this I can absolutely control what people do with my ideas mentality that seems to be almost as common as the idea that content creators don’t need to get fed. Both are completely out of touch with reality from my point of view. Yes, my viewpoint is kinda weird for the area that I produce content in, but that is neither here nor there.
Yeah, right now the two biggest problems for me creating more consistent content are funding and drive to produce, which ties directly into the funding issue. However unlike a lot of people that I have met personally who create content. I understand that I don’t have the ability to control what people do with my content. Let me explain further on the lack of control idea.
Now, of course, you are going to say that the content is copyrighted, and it is. However, just because something is copyrighted doesn’t mean I get magic powers or a natural law exists that will enforce how people view/use my content. Kinda of like how making a law against murder doesn’t actually prevent me from murdering someone. So I have to either appeal to an external force like the State to enforce the copyright or design my monetization strategy around a world where copyright enforcement isn’t practical. A world that technologically we are getting closer and closer to every day.
If you would like me to comment on how online business models are driving the war between consumers and large-scale creators specifically, with a huge number of casualties on the side I can. It doesn’t have as much to do with the “content should be free” idea as you might think. Though don’t get me wrong you will see a lot of people use that excuse.
You were doing so well with your last comment, and now this one is such a disappointment. I got bored after the first paragraph, largely because you aren’t as fascinating to me as you are to yourself. I bet they would adore you at reddit. So, here’s your comment. Hope it was worth murdering all those words.
I do think Brave goes too far, but nor is it the case that publishers hold all the power.
The abilities of advertising on the Web have always been decided by a sort of negotiation between users (and their proxies, the browsers) and advertisers (and their proxies, the publishers). For example, when publishers abused Javascript to create pop-up ads, browsers began to block pop-ups. When publishers abused cookies to track people across multiple sites, browsers began to block third-party cookies. When publishers abused Flash to create annoying and power-hungry animations, browsers began to limit when Flash would run. Though these are considered normal today, they were all controversial moves at the time. At each of these steps, the publishers complained that this was a violation of their right to monetize their content and would financially ruin them, but seen from the larger perspective, these complaints look as rote as the party opposing the President insisting everything he does is tyrannical and he has no respect for the Constitution. Despite 43 presidents who the opposition insisted were tyrants, the republic endures; despite one allegedly ruinous curb to their advertising power after another, advertising on the Web endures as well.
Now, the way this negotiation has traditionally worked is that the advertisers did whatever they wanted and browsers blocked the things that users disliked the most. Brave turns this on its head, attempting to dictate what is allowed rather than what is forbidden—and to capture some revenue in the process. In the political analogy, this is something like the unconditional blocking tactics the Republicans have lately used against the Obama administration: permitted by the rules of the game, but a significant departure from previous norms.
Personally, I find both the 114th Congress and Brave distasteful and perhaps unwise, but I don’t think either of them is acting illegally or even crossing any bright moral lines. It’s not that they’re doing any particular thing that is wrong, but rather that they’re taking a position so extreme that it could eventually cause the system to break down.
Why? Why did you murder all those words for nothing? Why?!?
Brave is not the first to get into the middle of the advertising pie. You can look into Deep Packet Inspection to see how your ISP may be after their slice. I suspect that DPI advertising is much closer to the business model of taking OPC and substituting advertisements. Brave’s response to the NAA on April 7th of this year, claims that this is not what they do. As for Brave’s ethical argument, I expect they’d say that if Winston Smith had been using their browser to peruse the American Cancer Society website, he wouldn’t have had to sue Facebook.
Who cares? Brave is the example Cory used. This is about the issue, not Brave.
There’s a nuance being missed here that might be relevant: Ad-blockers, including Brave, don’t actually “strip out” anything, since the web page as you see it in your browser never existed until the browser assembled it. If it were true that you take the content “as it comes”, as you suggested to an earlier commenter, you wouldn’t see any ads at all — just some punctuation around made-up words like “iframe” and a URL, forming the HTML equivalent of “insert the information from http://ad-network.wherever/ here”. You (that is, your browser, acting as your representative) could choose to find that information and insert it there, then follow a bunch of complicated processes to make something based on the information actually appear on the screen, or you could just skip it. Instead of imagining ads being cut out of a newspaper, it would be closer to suppose that the Saturday Morning Analogy, maybe in a bit of a budget crisis, runs some ad blocks that read “Go to Times Square and look at our billboard for thirty seconds!”; are you really committed to calling it theft if I distractedly glance at the side of a milk carton instead?
With this in mind, Doctorow’s description that Brave “replaces” ads is really a meaningless rhetorical device. It’s just as accurate to say that Brave displays its own ads in exchange for its service in the same way that many ad-supported browsers, RSS readers, and other services have been doing for as long as internet advertising has existed. From this perspective, Brave is a free browser which shows ads to its users because browser coders have to get fed too. It also happens to contain an ad-blocker, which, as you’ve pointed out to commenters several times already, is an entirely separate issue. Or do these two things become toxic just by the combination?
As far as a publisher’s right to monetize content goes, content is never monetized unless you charge for it. If you make money running ads, you’re monetizing the ads, not the content. The content may help convince people to pay for ads by encouraging other people to look at them, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that this makes them the same thing.
On Brave’s site, they have a response to the NAA that, among other things, states as follows:
“Brave is not, as the NAA asserts, “replac[ing] publishers’ ads on the publishers’ own websites and mobile applications with Brave’s own advertising.” We do not tamper with any first-party publisher content, including native ads that do not use third-party tracking.”
Now, if this is correct, then it would seem that ads ‘placed into the content by the publisher’ (my words) or ‘first-party publisher content, including native ads that do not use third-party tracking’ (their words) will be not be ‘replaced’. Blocked? Doesn’t say. But not stripped and replaced with another ad and a consideration paid.
What they do seem to want to block are third party ads – I assume the ones where the site owner includes something like an -insert MegaBucksPayPerView ad here- tag with pay_me_fractions_of_a_cent=true and track_the_shit_outta_everyone=that’s_cool_with_me.
It’s possible that with Brave, the advertiser still end up paying the site owner their fraction of a cent, because their ad was served up. However, they get no useful tracking data in return. The eyeball at the end sees a different ad instead of the one the advertiser paid for to be included, which will make the advertisers mad, but best I can tell, nothing illegal has happened here.
Legal or nay, if this becomes fashionable, it will break the ad-supported model on which a good proportion of the web relies. I do not expect the resultant shitfight will improve the internet experience for anyone.
Aside from raising the question of what “best you can tell” is supposed to mean, that’s the question. whether something illegal (or immoral, as Cory includes) has happened. Is it surprising that Brave argues that what it’s doing is kosher? Hardly. But that doesn’t answer much of anything. Nor is it limited to the question of money. A publisher may choose not to have ads associated with an agenda that offends him next to his content, or in conflict with his views, other advertisers, etc. This is a non-monetary issue, but still a very fair concern.
‘Best I can tell’ was shorthand for ‘I’m not a lawyer or a judge – and I’m a very long way from all the action’. Keener minds than mine can argue the legalities.
That said, I know of no legal framework that could compel a web browser to display in any particular way. If someone chooses to view the internet with a browser that replaces all the swear words with @#%¥, I can’t see how you could stop them. I don’t see any mechanism to control the presentation of a web page – after the data has been received (intact and unadulterated at this point) by the viewer.
Is Brave kosher? Well, the original advertiser gets ripped off. He is likely paying for his ad to be served up. The ad gets included in the page data and sent to the user. Contract fulfilled. The advertiser got what he paid for. The ad was delivered to a viewer, who may *potentially* see the ad. Whether the viewer actually notices the ad or even receives it intact was never within the control of the advertiser, much as the tv can’t stop you from taking a leak during the commercial breaks.
Naturally, advertisers will figure out that the 100 views they expected has suddenly become 100 *maybe* views and start to wonder if their advertising dollar is being well spent. It’s at this point that things will get interesting and not in a good way.
You assert that a publisher should has a right to control the presentation of their material, including the ads that accompany the material. However, where that material is a web page, whatever it’s made to look like once it’s been received by the user is entirely up to him and his browser.
There are certainly laws governing whether an ISP or data carrier is permitted to interfere with data en route to a user. But after being received?
When you rent out your users eyeballs to an advertising service such as Google, you are ceding a certain amount of control. How much would depend on the fine print of the agreement. I’ve not seen one. You may find that if you signed up to host a banner ad and Google ended up using it to peddle Avvo or worse to your own discerning readers, you’d be free to stop taking Google’s money.
Hosts of third party banner ads would get little say in how that space is to be used unless they have sufficient clout to warrant special treatment.
This is where you don’t get to go any further. Of course you know of no legal framework. You’re not a lawyer. Full stop.
“The ad gets included in the page data and sent to the user. Contract fulfilled. The advertiser got what he paid for. The ad was delivered to a viewer, who may *potentially* see the ad.”
This is (probably) not true. What is certainly delivered to the user is the _instruction_ (in the originating web page) to go _get_ the ad; the ad blocking step ignores the instruction and the ad is never delivered to the viewer. The advertiser doesn’t pay for anything because it didn’t deliver anything.
So not only is the claim not relevant the point of discussion, it is factually incorrect.
SHG isn’t down with OPC. (Okay, really Brave, but that doesn’t scan and isn’t as funny.) And that’s reasonable, given the potential for abuse. Not to mention the sheer gall of presuming that the decisions of Brave and/or the viewer are superior to SHG’s (or anyone else’s, for that matter
I have no clue if my decisions are superior to anyone else’s, but when it comes to my content, I’m allowed to be as right or wrong as I wanna be, because this is America and it’s my friggin’ content.
IANAL so I hope to not make people stupider….here goes.
Isn’t this the exact same as finding an article I like (or, heck, just finding all publications ’cause someone’s gonna read ’em!) and republishing them with ads from which I make (more) money? The fact that Brave puts the “pixels” thru a layer in the browser stack that let’s you do this live while pulling directly from the publisher’s website doesn’t matter. The fact that they say that they’ll share what money they want with content owners also does not matter. Brave makes money off of OPC by adding their own ads to the publishers finished product. Product that has revenue streams designed and paid for. Brave is “using” their copyrighted product without their consent even if it’s done at the browser level.
The Ad-blocker and viewing mode excuses are red herrings. The concept is to use content owner’s publications to make money without their consent.
Well, yeah. That’s how I see it.