A new web browser that blocks ads and serves its own, giving the viewer a cut of the ad revenue, has been branded “blatantly illegal” by US publishers.
More than a dozen major US newspaper publishers have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the Brave Browser that features built-in ad-blocking software.
Brave doesn’t simply remove ads; it actually replaces them with ads from its own network. When users do elect to see the ads, they can get paid, in bitcoins, for 15% of the total ad revenue.
The publishers themselves, whose content houses the new ads, will get 55%, while another 15% goes to Brave and its advertising partners.
The cease-and-desist letter said the plan by Brave Software Inc. to speed page loading times by stripping away ads the papers had sold and replacing them with ones sold by Brave was “indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website.”
The letter was addressed to Brave founder Brendan Eich, the former chief technology officer and briefly chief executive of Mozilla, who launched the new browser earlier this year.
It was signed by legal representatives for 17 newspaper groups, which collectively publish about 1,200 daily newspapers, including Gannett, the New York Times and Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal.
“We stand ready to enforce all legal rights to protect our trademarks and copyrighted content and to prevent you from deceiving consumers and unlawfully appropriating our work in the service of your business,” the publishers wrote in the letter.
In response, Brave claims that the NAA has misunderstood its system and that their service “is the solution, not the enemy.”
Brave promises its browser users a faster Web surfing experience by blocking tracking devices and intrusive ads.
Users can choose whether to see ads or pay sites directly through a micro-payment system to view content, which Brave said gives “users and publishers a better deal.”
Users can also select the ad-replacement mode where they are shown fewer ads, which are sold by Brave and deemed by the company to be safer and faster. Brave said publishers would receive 70% of the ad revenue through the arrangement, which is “far greater than the average percentage in the current programmatic display ad ecosystem.”
“We sympathise with publishers concerned about the damage that pure ad blockers do to their ability to pay their bills via advertising revenue,” Brave said in the statement. “Brave has a sound and systematic plan to financially reward publishers. We aim to outperform the invasive third-party ads that we block, with our better, fewer, and privacy-preserving ads.”
Brave said isn’t committing illegal copyright infringement because its browser doesn’t technically “republish” content as the group of publishers alleges, so therefore can’t be accused of the unauthorized republication of web content.
Foot…
… Gun…
… BANG!
Dear Advertisers, YOU are the problem, not ad blockers. YOU are the ones who are annoying people off to such an extent that they want to use adblockers. YOU are the ones who left the door wide open for Malware. YOU are th eones whose bloated content costs me money to dlownload on mobile.
You have got so wrapped up in the idea that getting your content in front of peoples’ eyeballs is the most important idea that you can’t see that people are fed up with their eyeballs bleeding as a result of all this crap!
Try stepping back and taking a deep breath and considering *why* people are blocking your content and think that, just perhaps, there’s a better way of doing things.
Or you can sit in your smug little echo chamber and ignore anyone who points out anything that conflicts with your idea that “Well, advertising’s good, isn’t it, so more advertising’s got to be even better, hasn’t it…?”
So, how about this:
Rules for advertisers
I have a few rules advertisers must follow before I will disable Ghostery and NoScript. These rules are not too difficult because the internet once thrived when my rules were being followed, except for rule 6. If it was successful once, it can be successful again.
(1) Absolutely no tracking in any way, no exception.
(2) Absolutely no autoplay videos or animated ads of ANY kind except when I press ‘play’ on a video or when I click on a link for a video (and NOT a link for a story).
(3) Absolutely no ads that cover part or all of a website.
(4) Absolutely no ads that try to use my location. No “Shocking secret [city name] man discovers!”
(5) Absolutely no ads that use Flash, Java, or Javascript, no exception.
(6) Since you took the money, you are financial responsible for vetting your ads. If you ads injects or attempts to inject malware, you uncondiitonally indemnify me for all costs including my time AND any losses.
(7) No ads for things I never buy.
(8) No ads for things I already own. (Amazon!! WTF?)
(9) No ads for things I will *never* own (take a guess, it will be 99.9999% of what you peddle).
I will in return consider visiting your website perhaps once a month and tick a box for every single object, service or whimsy I *might* be interested in and you can send me a link to a PDF I will download and read.
Otherwise, I will take all possible steps to block ads that consume cycles biological or electrical…
Thank you.
Signed
Everyone you’ve pissed off.
By way of followup, read this: http://bit.ly/1VHap1W and this: http://bit.ly/1VDpEth. Now this: http://bit.ly/1KQKued and this: http://bit.ly/1Nm4FYY and finally this: http://bit.ly/1r1sqM1. Now explain why we should not use AdBlocking