Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 01:01:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek <hoek@hwcn.org> To: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net> Cc: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, Matthew Hunt <mph@FreeBSD.ORG>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/www/ijb - Imported sources Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980504004025.9190B-100000@james.hwcn.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980503224218.20104J-100000@sasami.jurai.net>
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On Sun, 3 May 1998, Matthew N. Dodd wrote: > Finding a way to make money off the net isn't my problem. It appears to [...] > I'm not stealing. I'm simply opting not to view ad spam (I just realized [...] To my perhaps simple ears, some of the arguments here sound an awful lot like "I'm not going to pay taxes; it's my damn money and funding roads is not my problem, it's the government's problem." > We're right now determining the course of future Internet commerce. If > stripping annoying crap out of webpages becomes the norm then one might > expect less annoying crap overall once content sites realized the error of > their ways. Then the correct solution is not to view pages that have crap ads. Or, even better, email to the advertiser bitching about their ad. Typically, advertisers are very sensitive to criticism, if you speak to the right people (ie. don't email webmaster@whatever.com, send a proper postal letter or phone call to the company, something which demonstrates more than spur-of-the-moment interest). All this talk about the right to filter information entering one's home is quite nice. However, the right not to distribute information is being conveniently ommitted. You have a 100% right (not a legal right, but an ethical right most of us will agree) to filter information that you own. You do not own information until you've paid for it. You've not paid for certain types of information unless you've given the company a statistical chance of selling a unit(s) of their product to you. If you filter ads, that statistcal chance falls to near zero and you have not paid for the information. Oh god. Now you're going to argue that information wants to be free and that no one owns it. Until you suggest a better way of paying for its production (than the micropayments effected by advertising), then leave this argument for the philosophers. > You've not answered the Lynx question yet. How is it stealing when I have > a web proxy that doesn't pass web-spam to Netscape but not when I use Lynx > which doesn't load the images anyway. > > (Hint: You've got no leg to stand on.) I will attempt to ignore the vitriolic comment, although in saying so I've already failed. :( The obvious answer is that you're only stealing if you take something away. In the case of Lynx, it was never given to you, so you aren't taking it away (ie. it's the advertiser's responsibility to make sure that their information is compatible with your software, within reason). In the case of a delibrate, explicit _ad_removal_ (specifically) filter, you are intentionally taking away their revenues for service provided to you. -- Outnumbered? Maybe. Outspoken? Never! tIM...HOEk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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