So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.

Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.

Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.

Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.

These are honest questions and it seems way too fuzzy to me to be making moral judgments about the whole mess.

I think one does have the right to block ads on one’s machine if one chooses.

However, personally, because of the “if ad blocking was universalized, the services I appreciate would likely not exist” reasoning, I choose not to block ads.

As for other things like “muting/covering ads on screen”, yeah, that does seem a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I’ll even use a browser extension to fast forward an ad somewhat.

I do think this is something for the individual to decide how they will deal with ads. When I mute an ad, I don’t think I’m really free riding? For one thing, I don’t think it is contrary to the expectations of those being sold the ad slot. Me fast forwarding the ads a bit probably is contrary to their expectations, so I don’t have as good justification for it, but I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I do it. (Or, if I do, it is because the particular ad is objectionable enough that I’m willing to stick it to the advertiser)

It's the same mistake libertarians make when they assume a fully informed and rational society.

It's not a way to model reality, terrible or otherwise. That’s not what it purports to do.

How how-well-things-work depends on the number of people doing a thing, varies from thing to thing. For some things, as long as one or more people behave in a particular way, a thing goes well. For other things, if even one person does a particular thing, things go badly. And there are plenty of situations in between.

These different situations call for different responses, I think.

If their copyright monitoring algorithm recognises the tracks being performed and the licence holders have opted to receive a share of ad revenue rather than issue a takedown notice, then I think the answer might well be yes.

I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)

Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?

Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?

consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content someone made through hard work right now and for free and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and run untrusted code in my browser to work around that delay.

also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if there is no free content for me anymore. Their business model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true reality that things have costs?

Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it is what many youtube users seem to think.

Did I just pirate my drive to work?

if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?

I never claimed that ads can't be profitable; I was responding to a commenter who implied that ads are necessary in order to have a viable streaming business, which is very obviously not the case.

I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain utilitarian decision after they started hassling me with captchas and intimidations that someone at my IP address was using an ad blocker. So yeah, I'm paying protection money. But I don't feel in the least good about it.

I am not Google's accountant. They can figure it out.

> In 2024 the company made a revenue of $350.01 Billion USD

Now assuming that let's check how much it costs to host/recode/stream stuff. How dare companies want to profit right?

The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.

It's the same reason why DVR recording was never piracy. It's the same thing as if I watched the show, except the DVR does it.

The difference is you still see the beginning of the ad and some people see a big part of it because they don't have the habit of muting and looking away out of fear of missing the beginning of the video for example.

> The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.

You still see the beginning of the ad. Whether you buy something or not is not always what the ad is trying to do sometimes it's just raising awareness

[citation needed]

You're saying no content would be created if there were no payments?

Have you never met a real artist?

99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet, without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much less spam.

And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe sites for example.

If they were unable to gain any revenue from advertising, they would go out of business if they could not find an alternative source of income.

I feel that they are more likely to find an alternative than go out of business. That alternative might not motivate people to make content that no-one wants and trick viewers into watching. If it were a system where the users being happy dictated their income perhaps the service might be better than a system where the happiness of advertisers defines how much they get

Similar reason to why DVR recording is not pirating.

I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.

That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.

Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?

If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.

A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).

In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.

Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.

the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite.

the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads.

and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.

Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?

When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?

It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.

You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something similar.

its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads.. either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend people should be obligated to only watch your videos by paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.

Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled.

Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change.

The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives.

The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered.

The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all.

Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.

Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it

Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.

This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google.

Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want.

The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway.

It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.

Patreon pays out $300m total across everything people use it for per year.

Not even close in scale.

You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.

I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol

What the guy was saying is that circumventing payment to watch a movie = pirating, and it seems like you're saying that's not the case. It seems you're saying that people saying "pirating" are referring circumventing payment and distributing, which is not at all what the majority of people mean by pirating.

Pirating != distribution for the vast majority of how people use that word - it means consuming the media without paying for it.

literally OP:

> "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips

I'm not actually sure what you're issue is at this point. In the US, if someone says they're going to "pirate a movie" they are assuredly not talking about how they are going to be the one distributing the movie, just consuming it - whether that's on a "streaming" site or just downloaded and watched locally.

It seems like your argument is that "piracy" is much more specific than how people actually use the word. SO it's a semantics thing, and that's really fucking stupid lol

This is redistributing.

The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.

I would prefer not to, so I don't.

Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.

Perhaps not literally, as in on the financial books.

But certainly in leadership "values".

This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)

I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.

A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.

I am allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.

But in this case you don't have one in the first place.

Legally able to watch and legally able to splice up are at the same level, as far as copyright is concerned. And I don't even need to make an extra copy to do the kind of live splicing an ad blocker does.

This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.

Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?

I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.

It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.

Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?

You know that when a public pace of business has "No dogs" sign and you enter it, that you entered into a contract with that business... right? And it doesn't matter if you noticed it or not.

You are incorrect about that, which probably invalidates your other arguments. A condition of entry is not a contract. If you disobey the condition of entry then you have not broken a contract, and nothing changes between you and the business owner. They can ask you to leave and they can trespass you if you do not, but importantly, they can do those things for any reason they like, whether you obey the conditions of entry or not.

It is not a contract by law, nor does it meet the definition of a contract.

Similarly, YouTube can retract their website from public view, or attempt to block you specifically. But you have not entered into a contract with them by viewing the site.

It's literally a legal contract, under contract law. It's called a unilateral contract.

I didn't expect a Dunning-Kruger effect on NH, but here we are.

Please don't attack others, and in general, it's not a good idea to use terms like Dunning-Kruger when you are incorrect. Ad blocking is not piracy under any statuatory or case law, period.

A unilateral contract requires some kind of "promise accepted through performance"

I note that this does appear to be different under Australian law, if that is where you're from, although it's still not a unilateral contract.

Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a shop.

Google wants to show me ads. I don't want to see them. I demonstrated this by blocking them. Google continues to show me videos anyway. Clearly they're ok with the arrangement. They are free to present me with written terms, or gate all their videos behind a login, but they choose not to do so.

You are either very confused or playing stupid for some reason that I don't understand, but it isn't amusing or cute. This will probably earn me a dang warning but I don't really care - you are full of shit. You're making claims all over this thread that you've literally just made up.

also did the grocery store start out as a free food store similarly to youtube? and then just expect people pay despite not enforcing it?

I can point directly to the law in whatever jurisdiction you care to name that makes doing what you describe illegal.

You cannot point to anything that makes it illegal to view videos on a publicly accessible website without watching the ads that usually play before them.

You claim we're stealing.

In Texas, theft is a crime per Sec. 31.03:

> THEFT. (a) A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property.

Please link the law, and jurisdiction, that is broken when I view a YouTube video and don't view the ad.

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.31.htm#31....

Nobody disagrees with you that YouTube wants us to view ads.

Hah! Someone after my own heart. Well, since we're not talking law, let's get into it!

First of all, all profit is theft. Your boss and shareholders are only able to make money because they steal margin from your labor.

In this case, Youtube may be providing a platform, but what it gets in return is far more than it gives back to creators. Creators have no rights when it comes to Youtube - I can list many who were nixxed from Youtube because they violated a specific subset of neoliberal, puritanical "ethics." For example, Youtube will delist or demonetize videos that have too many swear words in them, or videos that discuss things that aren't illegal but Youtube doesn't like, such as adblockers or emulation software.

This is unethical. Youtube has no value outside of its creators. Yet it has total say over what kinds of content creators are allowed to make, and it sets the prices for creators, keeping the lion's share for itself. That is theft.

Youtube abuses its users as well, cramming features we don't want down our throats, like "Shorts" (puke) and increasingly longer ads. I know for a fact not enough revenue is going to the creators because they still need to seek external sponsorship, resulting in double-ads: youtube ones, and then sponsored portions of videos. Youtube also constantly enshittifies the UI. And, despite its puritanical neoliberal ethics, it does basically nothing about the extensive racist content on its platform (any video featuring black people doing just about anything will have years-old comments on it with racist content). And don't even get me started on the freakshow that is Youtube Kids. Just search "Elsagate."

Youtube feeds into the demonstrably mentally unhealthy attention economy and engages in dark pattern UX.

Youtube is undergoing platform enshittification, making things worse for its creators and users in order to extract as much profit as possible. It's not illegal, but it's certainly unethical. Given their shittiness, it's completely reasonable to leverage tooling to block their shitty ads. And don't pretend like this harms creators in any meaningful way. If I buy one t-shirt from a creator I like (which I do, frequently), I've given them more revenue per head than if I watched every single one of their videos, start to finish, one hundred times, with no ad blocking.

I was under the impression we were communicating, which I was genuinely interested in doing with you. Thank you for letting me know that wasn't the case.

I haven't read your comment and won't be replying to the content of it. I hope you have a good weekend!

This applies double, when you knowingly circumvent the agreement that "you're not aware of"

Next time I’ll instead pay someone to watch the videos on my behalf and then summarize me the videos sans-ads.

Will you also sumi?

I would love to be educated: when did I enter into an agreement with YouTube that I must watch ads to use their website?

YouTube is sueing me for damages. Their claim: I used their website but didn't watch the ads. (Maybe I used an ad blocker. Maybe I turned off my monitor and unplugged the speakers when the ads played. Maybe I walked away and let the ad play in a different room). What evidence do they submit in court to demonstrate I violated an agreement?

You've made quite a few comments across this thread, as have others that support your position. Not even within the YouTube TOS has anyone pointed out a contractual obligation to view ads. Not to mention YouTube doesn't require you to agree to their TOS to view videos.

With this in mind, it's perfectly understandable that someone could browse YouTube without any comprehension of something you seem totally confident on. I'm not being goofy here, I understand that YouTube wants me to view ads, I just genuinely am not aware of any contractual obligation to do so if I view videos.

Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?

I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.

If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.

That's quite literally what we call piracy.

I don't know if you're making some edge case argument without elaborating, or if you're just being ridiculous.

I'm serious. Show me in the Youtube Terms of Service where it says that blocking ads is against the contract. I've looked. Carefully. There is no such language there.

Item 2 of "Permissions and Restrictions" says you aren't allowed to "circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;"

where "content" is earlier defined as basically anything Google/YT sends you (which would include the ad).

A quick google search also takes you to a pretty straightforward statement from Google/YT: "When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service."

[TOS]: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8

[Help Center]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:...

Content on the Service The content on the Service includes videos, audio (for example music and other sounds), graphics, photos, text (such as comments and scripts), branding (including trade names, trademarks, service marks, or logos), interactive features, software, metrics, and other materials whether provided by you, YouTube or a third-party (collectively, "Content”).

Where is advertising defined as "Content"? (EDIT: For clarity, this paragraph is my own words; the previous paragraph was the quote from the ToS).

Further, there's the "Our Service" paragraph:

"The Service allows you to discover, watch and share videos and other content, provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe, and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small."

The service acts as a distribution platform for "original content creators and advertisers", two different categories. There's content (made by content creators) and there's what advertisers produce.

If Youtube wanted to define advertising as part of the Content (capital letter because in legal matters, definitions in the contract matter, and that's the term that they defined), they had plenty of opportunity to do so.

The statement by Google that blocking ads is a violation of their ToS is, of course, their opinion. But what ultimately would matter in a lawsuit is the contract. And nowhere in the contract do they state that advertising is part of the Content.

Their best argument in a lawsuit would be that adblocking is "circumventing" part of the Service, because they have defined being a distribution platform for advertisers as being part of their Service. But considering that the actual function of adblocking is simply not making HTTP requests, it would be hard for them to make that hold up in court against a skilled lawyer.

I've looked at it, and I came to the conclusion that the "advertising is part of the Content" argument does not hold up to the actual terms of service, and that the "adblocking is circumventing the Service" part does not hold up either: to say that something running on my browser, that makes no attempt to change their code and only skips certain HTTP requests, counts as "circumventing" features is a stretch. It's the best argument, so thank you for making it. But it's just not strong enough to hold up to the "If Youtube wanted to explain that adblocking was a violation of the ToS, they had plenty of opportunity to lay that out in detail in plain English (well, lawyerese) in the ToS itself" argument which any skilled lawyer would present in court.

So I'll grant that it's possible to read "adblocking is a violation of the ToS" in the terms, if you peer at the penumbras and emanations of the wording. But at no point did they take the opportunity to lay it out in clear language. And statements from a spokesman are, legally speaking, worthless; only the language of the contract matters in a court case.

P.S. I've upvoted you, since you've actually taken a real look at the Terms of Service, unlike the guy making that grocery store analogy.

There's a legal obligation not to steal, of course, and if you want to call that a contract I can't stop you. But if you're claiming there's an implicit contract to buy something when you walk into a store, you're wrong.

Now, if I was walking into the store all the time just to stand around not buying anything, that would be trespassing, and if they asked me to leave their property I'd be obligated to follow their wishes. But if I'm walking in in order to buy some bananas, but they're nearly out of bananas and the ones they have left all look bad, then I'm perfectly within my rights to walk out without buying anything.

In what way are you claiming that the grocery store analogy holds to adblocking on Youtube?

Deaf and blind people are allowed to enter despite their inability to see and hear adverts and jingles.

Fully able people with headphones that avoid looking at ads are not ejected.

You have a very weak position here that isn't advanced by this analogy.

What is the thing that compels you to watch ads on a service like Youtube? There's nothing in the law; if there is anything, it would be spelled out in the Youtube terms of service: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Can you find it for me? I've looked. Many times. It isn't there.

This is true even when that free sample has "rules" like "not for adults" on a jar of cookies.

Grocery stores often purposely price things below cost to get you in the door. If you go to your local grocer, buy a hundred subsidized Turkeys and nothing else, you have again committed no crime or moral violation even though you have explicitly cost the company money and they wanted you to buy other things.

Terrestrial FM radio and TV broadcasts have existed for decades and both provide ample case law. You are just wrong, and Google knew that when they bought Youtube.

Google also regularly reduces the ad pay out to Creators and increases their own take. Google can fuck off.

Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.

YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.

Payment is not a good indicator. Tons of free content has no payment, and a good chunk of pirate content is paid for.

2. I don't care.

I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.

Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their opinions, that's not a discussion.

Whatever, you already said you don't care about actual rational discourse and regard everyone else as (un)paid actors, so this is pointless.

Guys, please disable your adblockers

People disable adblockers

Malware!

When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch the content, and pay for the internet connection and power to my house, only then will they have a claim to what commands are run on my computer.

But my computer, that I pay for, using the power and bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.

If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely free to not send me any content they don't want me to watch.

Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of how much they used.

Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged the same as someone who watches 200 videos.

We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is not piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy shakedown.

Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.

Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?

You can say that we should not be blocking those ads, that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised copies of the content.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45177601