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During an outbreak of common sense in a Hamburg, Germany, court it was ruled that.. no, advertisers don't get their own way every time.
Zeit Online GmbH and Handelsblatt GmbH as representatives of the advertising world filed suit against Eyeo GmbH (the owners of AdBlock Plus) claiming that the latter should not be allowed to distribute software (a browser plugin that blocks ads) that disrupts their income stream.
The court did not look favourably on the advertisers' case.
From an article in The Register :
Ben Williams, a director of Eyeo, wrote in a blog: "The Hamburg court decision is an important one, because it sets a precedent that may help us avoid additional lawsuits and expenses defending what we feel is an obvious consumer right: giving people the ability to control their own screens by letting them block annoying ads and protect their privacy."
This has ramifications for another simmering case in neighboring France.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:20PM
They pay the newspapers to carry their adverts, they do not pay you.
They pay the football clubs to carry their adverts around their stadia, they do not pay you.
At no point in the past has the final viewer of the advertisement been paid to view it.
Why should the internet be any different?
That doesn't mean they dont have things a bit back-to-front. The web works on requests from users to servers, and the server has the final say whether it serves the data or not[*]. But from the client's perspective - there should never be any obligation to request anything, it should always be the individuals choice what they request. Advertisers are just servers in this role - if they are unhappy with how we are treating their valuable product, they should refuse to give it to us until we pay for it - that would work just fine for me.
[* Case law shows that at least in the US this is not understood at all, which is why programs like wget have been described as "hacking tools", and why deleting the filename from the end of a URL to get a directory name has been judged as "illegal access to a computer". General IT literacy seems to be right down in the dumps to be honest. I think my (least) favourite show of IT bullshit in a court of law was MIT's Prof. Stuart Madnick, who was an "expert" witness for Microsoft - "One cannot delete the Web browser from KDE without losing the ability to manage files on the user's own hard disk."]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aichon on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:18PM
stadia
Just to share a fun fact about "stadium" and its pluralization (I'm not trying to play grammar nazi here; I just thought this was interesting when I learned it a few years ago), depending on which sense of the word you're using, the word should be pluralized differently. Specifically, "stadium" has a few definitions:
1) It can refer to a track used in ancient Greece and Rome for foot and chariot races.
2) It can refer to the measure of length (about 185m) for the aforementioned track.
3) It can refer to a sporting structure with tiered seating for spectators.
Typically, when we use the word today, we're referring to the third definition, since we're talking about an arena or other structure. The first two definitions are rarely used today. What's interesting is that the third definition, which originated in the mid-1800s, is pluralized differently than the first two. The first two are pluralized as "stadia" (likely owing to their ancient etymological roots), while the third is pluralized as "stadiums" (likely because it's a word of modern origin). As a result, there's quite a bit of confusion over how to pluralize the word, especially so since a good chunk of the dictionaries that include "stadia" as a valid pluralization fail to indicate which senses of the word take that pluralization.
(Score: 5, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:25PM
Interesting. So Americans weren't the first to use "football field" as a unit of measure.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:36PM
But perhaps part of the club promoting fuzzy units for exact references? :P
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:06PM
But in a newspaper I am not forced to look at the advertisements, I simply skip over them and read the articles. (Ok, that isn't true, I don't read newspapers anymore, but back when I did, this was the case.)
Some guy does not run up and grip the newspaper out of my hand if I refuse to read the advertisements. Also, most of my paper reading was on the toilet, so this would have been super extra awkward.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday April 22 2015, @07:01PM
But in a newspaper I am not forced to look at the advertisements, I simply skip over them and read the articles. (Ok, that isn't true, I don't read newspapers any more, but back when I did, this was the case.)
This is the problem with internet advertising. I would not care if there were ads on the pages I visit if that is all they were. I do not believe anyone really ever did. Internet advertisers seem to feel that not only are they entitled to show us their ads, but also that they are entitled to track us all over the internet. Not only that, in extreme cases (not rare enough), they feel they are entitled to take control of our PC's by installing their malware so they can continue to serve us ads when they want to do so. They started breaking the "rules" and making everyone hate ads when they first started using pop-ups in advertising. I switched to Firefox back then because it had a built in pop-up blocker and since then it has been a running battle to block their intrusions. They are losing, and like all too many corporations seem to do now when their business models are failing, they resort to trying to get laws passed to force us to support their business model rather than changing to something that is acceptable.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:38PM
They will try to keep their business model alive as long as they can. It's profitable you know?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:57PM
I would not care if there were ads on the pages I visit if that is all they were. I do not believe anyone really ever did. Internet advertisers seem to feel that not only are they entitled to show us their ads, but also that they are entitled to track us all over the internet.
You've hit the nail on the head.
Although i disagree that nobody cared about ads. Ads that are abusive in size, with noise or video, or take up more space than the content are objectionable even without tracking.
But no specific advertiser has anything to gain by tracking me all over the net. Why would Ford or GM care if I clicked a Bob's Burgers ad? Why should they know this? Kohls or Target haven't got the smarts to track me, they can barely keep thieves out of their own cash registers.
The problem is that large ad selling companies got in the mix. They are the ones doing the tracking these days.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:59PM
In fact, I would even extend this to: I wouldn't care at all about ads, except that the advertisers are scammers and spammers, every single one of them. Pop-up ads, then pop-under ads, flash ads, ads that put a panel over the content. Pages with one paragraph per page to increase ad hits. Unskippable video ads, web bugs, trackers, personal information sales, slashvertisements, paid "review" sites.
It leaks into the real world as well. People don't pay enough attention billboards around here, so they now have these obnoxiously bright video ads. Thanks, I wasnt using my night vision while driving, anyhow.
Here is one [triblive.com] where the advertisers are suing a couple that complained about an overly bright billboard because the mean couple dared speak out against them.
Do I have any shame for using adblock at every single opportunity? Hell no. They are all liars and scammers. All of them.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Wednesday April 22 2015, @11:45PM
Why should the internet be any different?
Because, as it currently stands, internet advertising is built on the idea that the advertisers can run their untrusted code on your machine, counter to any sane concept of safe computing. It's your CPU, your electricity, and your OS that risks being served malware, not theirs. You're effectively shouldering the burden of the cost of viewing those adverts. This is especially true for non-savvy users that have to pay others to repair their systems after getting a virus from yet another malware-laden advert.
That makes them fundamentally different than other forms of advertising.
When an advertisement plays on the radio, it doesn't get temporary control to parts of your car. TV commercials can't unmute the set, pause themselves until they know you're watching, or mess with your DVR's recording settings. When you're at a stadium, those advertisements plastered all over the architecture aren't installing apps onto your smartphone.
Then there's also the bugbear of advertising panopticon, where the advertisements are used to track everything you do and everywhere you go. As annoying as advertisements could get, they couldn't do more than get aggregate data about groups, like targeting TV ads based on the general age group of viewers of a specific show. With online advertising, if you even load a site that has any form of Google anything attached to it, Google's ad machine will remember and show you adverts for that product everywhere[1] you go.
I'm not saying they should be paying the end user to view the ads, but in the form online advertising takes now, it's very much a different beast than the others. It's worth noting, though, that other intrusive forms of data-gathering usually offer incentives for their intrusion. The closest examples I can think of to the online advertising panopticon we have now are surveys and that Nielsen rankings system for TV viewing. In both cases, you actually do tend to get paid for the data in some form.
[1] I've had the same incognito session running in Chromium for a couple days, and it's very clear that anything you see feeds the advertising monster. I followed a link early on and days later I'm still seeing ads for that product in Chromium. As someone that primarily browses with NoScript and Self-Destructing Cookies in Firefox -- which results in very generic, untargeted ads -- the difference is extreme, and creepy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:25AM
I think we're perhaps in violent agreement on this matter.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:08AM
Probably so; I was using your comment as a starting point, rather than attempt to refute anything said. The gist of my view is that, for better or worse, internet advertising is different than what's come before it because it expects more control (running executable code, requiring attention, etc.) and uses widespread surveillance for data gathering in ways that surpass even government espionage of previous decades. The increased demands and pervasiveness of online advertisers require either greater compensation (which we don't get) or greater resistance (NoScript, adblock, cookie stuff, etc.)
If online advertising were more like the offline forms -- passive, primarily visual, and largely non-tracking -- there would be much less pushback against them, but you can't put the genie back in its bottle. There's no way advertisers will quit doing any of it now, even if people push for regulations against the worst of it.
Not that that's likely to happen, so the only alternative is "war" against them, trying to block ads and trackers and effectively disappear, not out of a sense of greed -- I'm not opposed to ads themselves, as they sometimes introduce me to things I find useful -- but out of a desire to maintain my privacy and control of my own property.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:54PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday April 23 2015, @10:47PM
I generally see it the same way you do. However, we may not think of it as war but the advertisers clearly do. This lawsuit and article wouldn't exist if they didn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:18AM
So, if I want to advertise a service for newspaper owners, I can put an ad in the newspapers for free?
If I want to advertice a service for football clubs, I can put an ad on the stadium for free?
That's what you are arguing. That because the owner of the medium is also the target of the advertising, the owner of the medium should have to run the advertising for free.