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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.
Didn't he say that using adblockers in YouTube was basically piracy?
He did, and I disagree with that point. Piracy is copyright violation, ad-blocking is TOS violation. They're entirely different things.
That said, he said he understands why people do it and didn't condemn it, and in this video shows how you can do it. I think that's laudable, I just disagree with his assertion that blocking ads is in some way piracy.
The TOS are your licence to watch the copyrighted material, be it by paying a subscription or consuming ads. So if you break the TOS you're committing piracy. It's very clearly piracy, although I don't condemn it.
Ah, but what you don't know is that my TOS for when I watch a video is that if the video is bound by TOS, those employed by the company establishing the TOS are pedophiles and child abusers and I reserve the right to shoot them on sight.
This is clearly printed on my router, the megabytes can read it when they enter my room. I also have it somewhere in a doc file on my laptop that's been uploaded to my Google drive, as well as on this lemmy post that is unrestricted to the public. Google and any other entity have access to read this whenever they want.
Time to go shoot some child molesters, yeah?
Sidenote: I fucking hate people bringing up TOS. Any contract signed by one party is applicable to exactly that one single party, and my signature is vastly different from a mouse click.
I am not disagreeing with people using adblockers, the guy I responded to brought up TOS, I just corrected him about what they are because he misunderstands them.
Well, you specifically said blocking ads EQUALS piracy, and I don't see where blocking ads resulted with me owning my own copy of the content in question, or with me selling that content for profit.
But what if I don't agree to the TOS? I use YouTube w/o an account, I am never prompted to agree to any TOS, and I can watch videos just fine. So my understanding is the TOS doesn't apply because I never agreed to them.
I reject the idea that users are expected to go find the TOS when using a new website, and close the website if they disagree with the terms. I don't do that when entering a store, so why would a website be any different? If a physical store wants me to abide by some terms, they can either present it to me when I enter (e.g. checking ID at a bar or casino), or stop me when I violate some rule and tell me I need to leave or agree to the terms to continue being there. None of that happens w/ YouTube, I just load the webpage, click a video, and I'm watching a video. At no point am I presented with any form of TOS prompt, so I have to assume my behavior is acceptable for YouTube.
The only thing I'm doing differently from the average person is blocking ads, not by changing any of the code on the page, but by essentially blocking things at the network level. At what point have I committed piracy?
I mean, when I goto Google or YouTube signed out, and without an ad blocker/tracking auto reject I get a pop up with their short ToS, every time.
Huh, really? I just tried on a fresh browser (Safari on macOS) and didn't get any kind of popup. I never use Safari, so it's safe to say I've never accessed YT on it. I have no extensions, I was just presented with a page that says "search to get started" or something, then when I load a video, I get ads. No TOS popup at all.
So me adding an ad-blocker in this scenario wouldn't be an issue because I was never asked to accept any terms of service. At least that's my understanding. And it certainly wouldn't be piracy because I'm doing nothing to access something I shouldn't, YouTube is just giving me access because I asked nicely.
For me this is fighting over semantics. It doesn't really matter if it's legally piracy or not since nobody is gonna go after you for it either way. It's about whether what you're doing is moral or the intended way. You can use adblocker, but then you're just freeloading. Fact of the matter is that nothing is free and everything needs compensation when at scale. You can rightfully claim that YouTube shoves too many ads and that it's a monopoly so it abuses it's position, but at the end of the day you're using the service without compensating for it, so you're stealing at least something.
You're right, it absolutely doesn't, which is why it's so weird to me that Linus makes a big deal about it.
Which is why I either donate to channels I like or buy their merch. They get way more than if I wasn't blocking ads, and I don't have to support a company that manipulates people with ads. So I guess at the end of the day I'm "stealing" from YouTube, and I guess I'm okay with that. If they offered good value for their premium service, I'd pay. But they don't, so I just use an ad-blocker to get the thing I care about. I refuse to let them harvest my personal data, and that's basically what their advertising is designed to do. I'd disable my ad-blocker if their ads were provably not tracking me, but I know that to not be true.
I'm not against paying for things. I pay for Nebula, my email (Tuta), and some other alternatives to Google products, I just refuse to pay for artificial limitations. YouTube Premium sucks for my intended use-case (download news to listen to on my commute, and occasionally listen to music while doing chores), and it's not worth the $10 or whatever they charge for it. If they offered a lower tier (say, something based on watch-time), I might pay for it, more out of guilt than anything, but it needs to be a fair price. About half the channels I regularly watch are on Nebula or Odyssee, so I wouldn't miss too much if they blocked my access to it.
shrugs idk what to say. Google can fist themselves with a handful of rusty nails and broken glass if they think popping up tos or someone just being on the site is accepting it even if it's not shown. I wasn't arguing against your point. Just that the last time I went to YT with a fresh browser I was shown a ToS. That was easily two years ago, so maybe I should have just kept my....mouth? Uhhh....fingers? Shut.....I'll fuck off now. Sorry
No worries, I just haven't seen what you saw. Maybe it's a region-specific thing (I'm in the US), or maybe it only applies to certain browsers. Idk, I personally have never seen a TOS popup from YouTube.
No, it wouldn't stand in court.
Blocking ads is technically allowed by law, including copyright law in most countries I am aware of, while it's against Youtube's ToS.
Let's say I browse to a YouTube link. I have an ad-blocker, so ads don't load. How can I read the TOS when the video already played? I can't agree to the TOS yet because I haven't read it yet