My personal opinion is if the site wants to make it a requirement to view the ads, they can write the front-end and back-end code to enforce that.
Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it. Not that the court of public opinion would come down on their side, but the law certainly would.
I think in a world where using curl can get you charged and convicted, adblockers certainly stray dangerously close to exceeding authorized access under the CFAA. I don't think this is right, but I do think it's the reality we currently live in.
"Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it."
I agree - programming your browser through an extension to selectively retrieve elements is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access.
But I think it has been shown that iterating curl from a bash script was exceeding authorized access in Weev's case. Standard HTTP GET's to which the server replies "200 OK" but after the fact was deemed to be illegal.
Hence, there is some space between Point A and Point B but it's quite mirky IMO how large that space actually is.
We know, from a copyright standpoint, for example, that it's illegal to use an extension to surround someone else's material with your own ads. So you can't add ads, but you can remove them?
I don't know if there exists a case where a site has gone after users they knew to be using blockers (it wouldn't be difficult to determine this from the logs). But it would be an interesting case, to be sure.
Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it. Not that the court of public opinion would come down on their side, but the law certainly would.
I think in a world where using curl can get you charged and convicted, adblockers certainly stray dangerously close to exceeding authorized access under the CFAA. I don't think this is right, but I do think it's the reality we currently live in.