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Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU
(eupolicy.social)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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I honestly don't really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn't make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It's a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
Honestly, there is plenty of stuff I'd pay for but I pirate if it's difficult to access.
I don't know, I probably would have paid for at least half the things I pirate if I had to (especially books).
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren't infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn't cost anyone anything, it's all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube's bandwidth isn't free.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it's poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn't be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let's say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That's prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
The same way it is piracy to go to the bathroom during the commercials...
Look, the problem at hand is not if people use adblocker or not, the problem here is how Google check if you are using adblocker or not, which seems to be illegal.
Well, the full "check for adblocker" things seems to be illegal in EU, whatever way it is used, given a sentence from 2016
I don't think it's piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.