this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Yes, it's a violation of their TOS, but TOS is often illegal anyway.
I'm not modifying any of the content they send, I'm merely not rendering it. That's a very different thing. It's just like blocking fonts (I do that too), if I don't want an asset, I won't download it. If they want to block me because I'm blocking part of their page from loading, that's on them.
Piracy isn't only a legal thing. It's just dealt with through the legal system.
Sorry, I was wrong. You are however circumventing YouTube's playing ads.
Yes, I'm violating their TOS, but I also never signed their TOS agreement. I don't use a YouTube account, I just access their webpage. Nothing here is illegal, I'm just not rendering content that I don't want to see. I have no legal obligation here. Google doesn't get to decide what gets run on my machine, I do. If they don't want me to view their content, they should lock it behind a paywall or something.
I've not argued any of those points. Just that not watching ads on YouTube is piracy.
In the UK, piracy isn't a legally defined term, and the way that I would define piracy as the illegitimate procurement of media.
Right, and I'm arguing that it's not piracy. Piracy is a copyright violation, and blocking ads isn't violating copyright, it's only violating TOS. "Piracy" is the informal term for "copyright infringement," at least in my jurisdiction (US).
Here's a law stack exchange answer about it:
So I might be violating the DMCA by circumventing protections on the website, depending on what exactly the ad-blocker is doing, but just blocking URLs isn't a copyright violation, it's a TOS violation, which may or may not hold up in court. Therefore, not piracy.