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Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations.
(sh.itjust.works)
https://files.catbox.moe/a6111d.png / https://nitter.poast.org/LinusTech/status/1825956050685800834
If you go the video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsjHMzGl-VY. You will see it's gone. So Youtube being Youtube.
Here's a Odysee mirror of the video, https://odysee.com/@jopec:7/linus-tech-tips-degoogle-your-life-part-2-adfree-youtube:0.
It's really not. YouTube doesn't get to decide what I play on my browser, I do. I just choose to not load the ads, and I choose to skip over sponsor segments manually. I don't use sponsor block or anything automated like that, I just use a content blocker and the fast-forward buttons YouTube provides.
At what point did I pirate anything? I asked YouTube for content, and it gave it to me. I didn't ask it for the ads, and it didn't give it to me. I fail to see where the piracy occurred.
I'm certainly breaking their TOS, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm pirating their content.
If I find value in a platform, I'll pay. I pay for Nebula, for example, because I've gotten a lot of value from a number of their creators and prefer to watch their content there than on YouTube. I'll occasionally buy merch from a YouTuber, and sometimes donate. But YouTube actively tracks me in ways I'm not comfortable with, so I block their trackers and their ads.
...So, you skip the ads using an external program, which prevents the youtube channel you're watching from getting their money.
That's the part that makes it piracy. Of course you have the right to do this, I have no ethical problem with it, i'm doing it now, but you have to understand that when you're doing this you're preventing the youtube channels you're watching from getting paid, you're taking their content without paying them what they asked for in return.
If the youtube channel disables the ads themselves, that's one thing, but you not watching those ads is not what the youtube channels want... because that's how they get paid. Getting free content without paying the content maker is... piracy.
There's no external program, it's just an extension on my browser, which uses APIs within the browser to instruct it which content to load and which not to load. I tell it to block all kinds of things, from malware to large media elements to ads. YouTube doesn't get to decide what content it displays in my browser, I do, because it's my computer.
Yes, I'm preventing channels from getting ad-revenue, but that doesn't make it piracy. What we call "piracy" is more correctly called "copyright infringement." I'm not violating anyone's copyright, the video is freely available to load and watch, I'm just choosing to not load and watch the optional extras that get shipped along with the video. I'm violating YouTube's TOS, but that doesn't mean I'm violating copyright in any way, and I don't even need to login to YouTube to do this either, so it's not like I formally agreed to anything here.
What the channels want isn't my concern. If they want to enforce payment, LTT can post the videos to floatplane exclusively, or join up with Nebula.
That's absolutely not true. Piracy is copyright infringement, and I'm not infringing anyone's copyright here.
Here are examples of things that would be piracy/copyright infringement:
Each of those violates copyright because I'm sharing the video with people I am not authorized to share it with. Just watching the content and refusing to load the ads doesn't violate anyone's copyright, it just violates YouTube's TOS, which, AFAIK, isn't legally binding in any way. They can choose to block me from the platform, but not loading optional extras doesn't violate any copyright.
You're really spending a lot of energy calling piracy not piracy.
Would you call it piracy to yank out the ad insert from a free newspaper and throw it into the trash without looking at it? Because that's the exact analog from the non-digital world. Just because the mode of payment changes with the technical abilities of the medium doesn't change that.
No because the content creator got paid for the ad.
Of course it does, the part where the content creator doesn't get paid and is supposed to according to the rules of the platform is the part where it's piracy.
If you show me how that's physically possible I will concede your point, but until then: No, that's not nearly the same. You can't just selectively block physical ads.
While the comparison may make sense when not thinking it through, print is a completely different medium than digital where comparisons only make limited sense. In this one they don't at all.
Physical media does not track views (directly) or click through numbers, for example.