Adblock Plus

Background
In recent days mediawatch.dk have been reporting on a new type of plugin for firefox and IE, The plugin is designed to replace adds with banneradds for charities. AidOnline has thus stirred controversy. FDIM (union of danish internet media providers,) have decided to go to the courts in an effort to block AidOnline. FDIM want the courts to prevent aid organisations from, as they put it, steal add space from legitimate websites.

My questions
As a student of journalism and a passionate hater of all forms of advertising, I am somewhat torn... On one hand I really really really hate all types of advertising. On the other hand I too need to make a living, and adds are (or have been,) a large part of how the media akes its money.

So here goes:

What do you guys think of this trend of "blocking the blockers." Will software like addblock plus simply have to keep up with new methods of detecting and/or blocking its presence?

What are the legal implications of a court-ban on blocking software?

P.S. I tested, and turning off blocking for bold.dk does not allow you to view the page. Simply having the addon installed is enough (the pages simply displays en error message.)

MartinS wrote:P.S. I tested, and turning off blocking for bold.dk does not allow you to view the page. Simply having the addon installed is enough

Simply having the addon without any filters whatsoever shouldn't make any difference.

And it won't "detect" ABP if you let a few specific scripts load.
Using easylist and easyprivacy, I sort of made the site work by whitelisting a few of the scripts, and cleaned it up with these 5 filters: See if this works for you.

Btw. this forum is only for supporting ABP of course. If you installed another unaffiliated program on top of ABP, you're on your own.

MartinS wrote:What do you guys think of this trend of "blocking the blockers."

Nothing new here, they have tried to do this since forever.

MartinS wrote:FDIM want the courts to prevent aid organisations from, as they put it, steal add space from legitimate websites.

What are the legal implications of a court-ban on blocking software?

Legal implications on filtering software? I do hope the court realises that simple fact my monitor is my property down to each single square inch, or cubic inch for that matter...

But what can they do? Track down each user IP by court order and throw us in jail? Will that provide them more advertisement revenue?

And what about users who have disabled images and other plugins in their browser? They should go to jail too?
Or people who use browsers that only displays text?


Or what about all those incidents where people who clicked ads got their computers infected with viruses? Who will take responsibility and repair/compensate damages? The danish government?
There are people who use adblocking for security purposes so their kids won't be clicking all sorts of things that'll show up (on the monitor they paid for and own).

Then what about the commercial security programs like norton or kaspersky? They have content filtering for security purposes as well. Maybe they should go to jail as well?

@Adblock Plus Fan

The target of this court-ban is not the product ABP or the users of ABP.

The thing that is rotten in Denmark, is that a company has edited the source code for ABP in such way that the annoying banners are still being shown, but are being replaced with the companys own annoying banners.

So, the banners are still there, the revenue is still there, only it goes into the pockets of said company instead of the content creators.

That ABP is being blocked as well is unintented, but simply happens because this new program is built on top of ABP

At least the script on http://stop-aidonline.dk/ detects AidOnline extension explicitly (it is easy to detect, unlike Adblock Plus).

Goldfinger74 wrote:The target of this court-ban is not the product ABP or the users of ABP.

I know, MartinS was discussing legal implications on content filtering in general.

Goldfinger74 wrote:So, the banners are still there, the revenue is still there, only it goes into the pockets of said company instead of the content creators.

My opinion about this is still the same, I am the sole owner of my monitor, and I am the one who has the right to decide what appears on it.
If I decide to block ads, then that's my decision and right.
If I decide to allow ads, then that's my decision and right.
If I decide to allow specific ads supporting specific entities, then that's my decision and right.

The various websites have their right to reject me as a visitor, but nothing more than that. If I install something from aidonline, then that's a 2 party deal between me and aidonline, no one else should have a say.

Adblock Plus Fan wrote: The various websites have their right to reject me as a visitor, but nothing more than that.

Which is what they are doing, they are rejecting all visitors who use adblock plus or any banner blocking service. I believe I have a right to use adblock plus. Ofcourse I can use no-script and see their content anyway. But it would be nice if I can block their embedded javascript that block adblock plus, just on principle. My browser, my rules.

@Adblock Plus Fan

I know this is a technical forum, so I should not (and will not) debate what is right or wrong here. There are better suited fora for this

I just felt it was important to explain that the purpose of this initiative was to administer the right to "reject you as a visitor".

codegirl.dk wrote:Which is what they are doing

Goldfinger74 wrote:I just felt it was important to explain that the purpose of this initiative was to administer the right to "reject you as a visitor".

It looks like they are doing a lot more than just that though. They want aidonline gone from the face of earth by dragging them to court...

Yes, some danish medias do. Not bold.dk though, they choose to directly protect their content instead.

Again, I'm NOT discussing rights and wrongs! Just correcting the misconception of bold.dk strategy and intentions

Goldfinger74 wrote:Just correcting the misconception of bold.dk strategy and intentions

Ok.
I just mistakenly assumed that you where talking about the FDIM group, and not bold.dk.