Jon’s Network

News.com published an article wondering what legal action could be taken against users and makers of ad-blocking software: Web ad blocking may not be (entirely) legal

It’s ridiculous for site-owners to worry about this. Users that go through the hassle to use ad-blocking browser plug-ins are unlikely to click ads in the first place. This means ad-blocking technology has little affect on click rates. If site owners want better click rates, then make ads the visitors like. Blocking access to users with ad-blocking plug-ins is an option, but lobbying for legal action against users and creators of ad-blocking software would surely have no effect. How would the laws be enforced?

The authors also confuse the issue by discussing the policies of MySpace, LiveJournal, et al. The social network site policies prohibit their members from styling their profiles to hide the ads to make their profile page look better. Allowing ugly ads on their profile page is the price the users pay for having a “free” website. This is much different than webmasters expecting visitors not to do whatever they want with the website once it is downloaded to the browser. The webmaster can block or redirect the visitor if he worries about this, but that’s really the only reasonable course of action - and it’s not that reasonable when you consider that websites are made to be visited.

I really doubt ad-blockers will ever be illegal anyway. If ad-blockers were made illegal for violating copyright by creating derivative works, for example, then, by the same token, so would other plug-ins like Greasemonkey, which let’s you make on-the-fly changes to websites or Web Developer, which let’s you add your own style sheet to redesign web pages. Trying to keep users from doing this would be stupid and impossible.