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De-Google Your Life - Part 1 (piped.video)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

but TOS is often illegal anyway.

Piracy isn't only a legal thing. It's just dealt with through the legal system.

I'm not modifying any of the content

Sorry, I was wrong. You are however circumventing YouTube's playing ads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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:

First the broad strokes: It's not illegal to block ads.

...

But... that doesn't mean your use of an adblocker isn't in violation of US law.

The crucial issue with legality when it comes to adblockers is less about blocking ads, and more about circumventing a websites measures to defeat adblockers.

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.