I heavily disagree with your analogy. In your parallel you are obviously assuming that there is a contract in place. And by covering my ears and eyes I'd be obviously breaking the contract and would have to pay the pizza or get punished in an appropriate manner. If there isn't a contract and the pizza place would just give you a pizza and some ads, and you ignore the ads, that would be completely legal and in no way or form theft.
Now the thing with websites is, there is no contract. You just ask them for some content and they give you the content + ads. I'm free to ignore the ads. A good parallel would be a local newspaper that gets send for free to everyone, but also includes ads. I'm completely free to ignore the ads in this case. I would also be allowed to build a sorting machine that sorts out the ads before I ever have a chance to look at them. That's obviously no theft, after all they gifted it to me!
And this is exactly what most websites are. They send me free content and include some ads, without any contractual obligation. If they don't want me to just see the content without looking at the ads, they can always set up a contract requiring me to look at the ads. Or only show me the content after I've seen the ads. Or do anything else, that isn't just sending me content and ads without any obligations.
But until they do that, it's definitely morally right and legal to sort out the ads, just like I do with my local newspaper.
And something that I want to touch on seperately because it really annoys me. It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something. The taking part is really important when speaking about theft. But I'm not taking something from websites, I am asking for it and the website freely gifts it to me. On HN I'd really expect people to know how HTTP requests works. I'm not evading access controls, I'm not forcing them to give me the content, I'm not sneakily taking it away, I'm not hacking into their systems to take it.
I ask via the official way to ask for the content and they decide to send it to me. What I then do with the content on my local system is completely irrelevant and I have to right to modify it however I want, as long as I don't make it public or use it commercially obviously.
> A good parallel would be a local newspaper that gets send for free to everyone, but also includes ads. I'm completely free to ignore the ads in this case.
Of course you are. That's a very different scenario. I get junk mail all the time. It goes in the trash. Always.
It is UNSOLICITED.
> It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something.
Exactly!
You are destroying your own construct here.
The very first time you visit a website, you see ads. If you disagree with advertising and you visit that site again with an ad blocker, you have made a decision to steal their product.
They did not force you to visit a second time and you know they use ads to finance their existence.
They did not send you unsolicited content.
This is theft, because, to use your own definition, you "actively take something", by explicitly going to their site and blocking their potential revenue streams.
You might say: Well, since I have an ad blocker I have no way of knowing who has ads.
Right. Sure. Let's add that to the series of delusions supporting such thinking.
> I ask via the official way to ask for the content and they decide to send it to me. What I then do with the content on my local system is completely irrelevant and I have to right to modify it however I want, as long as I don't make it public or use it commercially obviously.
These sites support jobs, families, businesses. You think you are entitled to take their work product for free because you think so, because you think so, because you think so.
That's what it comes down to at the most basic: You think someone should work for you for free because you don't like what they do to pay for their salaries. Instead of not consuming their work product, you happily steal it. What do you think lies behind these sites? Robots? Picture a family having dinner next time you enable your ad blocker, perhaps that will introduce some humanity in your thinking.
I find that issues sometimes become much easier to understand when we explore the limits. In this case the obvious limit is 100% ad-blocking. The world-wide consequences would be severe way before we got to 100% blocking. The internet would likely collapse very quickly without advertising. People like you find all kinds of creative ways to rationalize stealing the work of others. If you don't agree with how they generate cashflow to pay for their salaries, don't consume their product.
The other thing I find is that people having such ideas, generally speaking, are folks who have never in their lives launched and operated a non-trivial business where they had to be responsible for the payroll that supported dozens of families. It is way easier to think of a website as a URL with no humanity behind it when you have never had such experience in life.
> The very first time you visit a website, you see ads. If you disagree with advertising and you visit that site again with an ad blocker, you have made a decision to steal their product.
Who made the determination that visiting the site is "stealing"? Most sites don't forbid ad blockers in their terms of service, and even if they did, it probably wouldn't be legally enforceable.
Nobody is obligated to donate their time and attention to support people who work in the advertising industry or anyone else. It is the responsibility of the business to maintain a sustainable business model. Businesses are not entitled to success, nor do they have the inherent right to allocate the time and attention of their users and customers.
Now the thing with websites is, there is no contract. You just ask them for some content and they give you the content + ads. I'm free to ignore the ads. A good parallel would be a local newspaper that gets send for free to everyone, but also includes ads. I'm completely free to ignore the ads in this case. I would also be allowed to build a sorting machine that sorts out the ads before I ever have a chance to look at them. That's obviously no theft, after all they gifted it to me!
And this is exactly what most websites are. They send me free content and include some ads, without any contractual obligation. If they don't want me to just see the content without looking at the ads, they can always set up a contract requiring me to look at the ads. Or only show me the content after I've seen the ads. Or do anything else, that isn't just sending me content and ads without any obligations.
But until they do that, it's definitely morally right and legal to sort out the ads, just like I do with my local newspaper.
And something that I want to touch on seperately because it really annoys me. It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something. The taking part is really important when speaking about theft. But I'm not taking something from websites, I am asking for it and the website freely gifts it to me. On HN I'd really expect people to know how HTTP requests works. I'm not evading access controls, I'm not forcing them to give me the content, I'm not sneakily taking it away, I'm not hacking into their systems to take it.
I ask via the official way to ask for the content and they decide to send it to me. What I then do with the content on my local system is completely irrelevant and I have to right to modify it however I want, as long as I don't make it public or use it commercially obviously.