She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like clicking on a link, it can't reasonably be claimed that I entered into a preconceived and negotiated contract where I agreed to payment for a service.
these two are not even close to the same thing. clicking a link is a very specific action "show me this stuff". Your analogy would be more apt if it involved going into a venue where music is performed.
The web equivalent is a paywall.
Now, bars put on free music. And you can go to them and not buy a drink regardless that the landlord puts on the music to get you to buy.
The landlord might get paid to have advertising up, like on a toilet vending machine. But me choosing not to look at it isn't morally wrong.
Arguably, even if I never buy a drink I can benefit the establishment socially.
The problem comes when the establishment not only needs pay the workers and buy the beer but also pay the breweries management and return dividend to share holders.
The web has moved to that stage where the capitalists have moved in - like large breweries owning pubs. Forums aren't run by the admins they're owned by media conglomerates, etc.. I'm really not sure it's made the web a better place.
Now, get off my lawn.
Is a fish obligated to swallow a hook that is cast into the ocean?? No reasonable fisherman would think this.
I'm not a personal fan of ads but when it comes to things I find important enough and have the option, I pay to remove them. The difference however is that the die-hards tend to not accept paying or viewing ads as acceptable. If they did, this wouldn't keep coming up.
Similarly, if I have no binding contract, it certainly can't be required of me to observe or respond to everything within the room. There is no origin for the musician's claimed right to oblige me to any commercial action.
It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
>They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.
This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price".
The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model.
The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative.
I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high.
I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days.
Give me a advertisement network which takes legal liability for what they advertise and follows local law, and we could start talking about what implicit deal exist when I visit a website. This mean no recording (data protection laws), no malware (anti-hacking laws), fair representation of the product, clear pricing, no alcohol, tobacco or advertisement towards minors, clear indication that its an advertisement, and the other rules that exist in advertisement laws here in Sweden. Tax laws involved are also always involved If there is a deal where service is provided in exchange for goods.
How do I know this without viewing ads that I don't agree to view?
> It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
The ego required to tell people who are explicitly not agreeing to your terms that they are implicitly agreeing to your terms is appalling. Surely we can believe people when they tell us what they agree to.
> This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You loaded this hacker news page with the intent of reading other users' posts.
I've never once loaded a page with the intent of viewing an ad.
If you don't want to view my posts, I'd be entirely fine with you writing a browser plugin that strips my posts from your page. Consume the content you want to consume, that's your prerogative.
They are free to take "counter measures". But that doesn't stop the fact that they are paying for both your time and the content.
Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections.
I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.)
So pray-tell, if my browser is `wget | html2txt | more`, do you consider me in the moral wrong for failing to also send various bits of PII to whomever CNN considers a Trusted Sponsor today and retrieve images, flash cruft, malware, or whatever else those Trusted Sponsors choose to respond with?
"In breach of implied contract?"
"Failing to respect social mores?"
"Doin' the wrong thing?"
I'm vastly less interested in quibbling about word choice than the underlying concepts being discussed.
Yeah, it's literally like that. I open a random webpage, wait a few seconds, and here they are. I visit my aunt, and don't even get to open the browser before BAM, ads everywhere!
