waffle

The stupidest thing I’ve read in ages: “Why Firefox is blocked”.

Apparently, a number of sites block Firefox since it allows extensions. One of these extensions is Adblock Plus. Therefore, apparently, the sites are “robbed of rightful advertisement revenue” and using this extension is apparently “theft”.

I am not making this up. I told you it was the stupidest thing I’ve read in ages. Here’s a clue stick. I’m going to beat anyone willing very hard with it. Here’s how the Internet works:

1. Supposing it satisfies local laws and your server network’s policy, you are free to make anything at all available on the Internet.
2. You are free to offer this up to as few and as many people as you’d like, using whatever protocols you please.
3. As soon as people have downloaded, streamed or fetched this information in any way, it is theirs to do anything with. You don’t get a say.

Surprisingly, many people do not get point 3.

Smart tags were shot down in an Internet Explorer beta years ago for providing contextual data recognition. Because it was Microsoft and because the idea was that they’d actually misuse their large market share to shoehorn people into using Microsoft services this way (rather than any other way), people who should know better were furious and began to disable smart tags on their sites via a specific meta tag. The same thing happened with the similar image toolbar, which was a bit more understanding since it appeared on practically any image large enough to fit it, and most layouts used tables with inline images to acheive layouts.

Now people are doing this again with Greasemonkey, where you install JavaScripts that load on specified sites and mess with the document. And people are doing it all the time by inventing screen scrapers, to, say, load a web site and turn its contents into a feed. It’s not only accepted, it’s useful for everyone and it’s something you’re entitled to.

People. Stop. What do you do on the Internet? You get to send information to people when they’ve requested it. Normally, the receiver gets use of it, and may even send information back to you. But that’s it. It’s your right to broadcast your information to the people you choose; but regardless of if those people include everybody or not, it is the user’s innate right to do whatever the hell she pleases with the information she receives. If you don’t get this, please do the rest of us a favor and abandon the Internet at once. You are not welcome.

If people click your ads, you are privileged. And if people don’t click your ads, chances are your ads are annoying. Instead of telling people to go fuck themselves and accusing them of crimes they didn’t commit for not liking your site, why not improve your site?

Update: Sören links and nails it:

[B]oth of these absurdities are prevalent not just in advertisement-supported websites, but also in other media, such as TV. This goes so far that many people indeed think that blocking advertisements (such as by, say, cutting them out of your PVR recording) is somehow morally wrong. It’s not! It never has been. If you want to show your token of appreciation for content, go buy a product of theirs with an actual price tag, or donate to the producers. For any company or organization to rely primarily, or even exclusively, on advertisements for their profits is their choice to make, and their problem to deal with.

This is the reason that, when you say that you want to get rid of DRM, people ask you if you don’t want the artists to get paid. (And the answer is that it’s up to them to make sure they get paid. You don’t have a responsibility to pay for stuff you hear – it is however courteous to pay for stuff you like, and courteous of the labels in return to not give you a crippled product.)