September 13, 2007
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Advertisement and Theft
The first time I heard this absurd argument was way back when I was in college maybe 6 years ago or so and I remember that no one took it seriously and everybody thought it was kind of absurd. But I heard it again and again over the years and I heard it fairly recently. And it isn’t amongst the kooks or the fringe elements. It’s very mainstream. It’s become common to say it and everybody seems to take it a lot more seriously now than they did then. I wonder what changed.
The argument goes that if you block or skip advertisements than you are stealing the content from the content producers just as surely as if you had walked out of the store with a DVD without paying for it. And consequently those tools that allow advertisements to be skipped are enablers of theft and should be illegal. Before it was popup blockers, and tivo, now’a'days people are complaining about the adblock extension for firefox and demanding that people boycott firefox because the developers haven’t disowned the extension.
The articles discussing this idea try to be somewhat neutral and they don’t often come out full out in favor of banning such tools, but they do set the tone of the discussion in such a way that is consistent with the aims of those who want to paint advertisements skipping as an unjust act.They call it a “moral” issue. Or they say things like the “ethical question” and so on.
But this us utter B.S. There is no inherent moral issue here. The people making this argument as just making an obvious logical flaw that should be treated as dismissively as one might treat someone claiming that the sky is red or that pigs can fly. It’s just nonsense.
The argument that since some content is able to be distributed for free or reduced cost because of advertising implies that skipping advertisement is unjust is ridiculous. If A requires B in order to exist, that is no where near enough to imply that skipping B makes you responsible for the loss of A. Indeed, in the case of advertising A will not in any way be jeopardized unless a critical mass of entities skip B, but any particular person skipping B will have no effect on the survival of A.
But even if you are some mythical tipping point person. I.e. you’re the free rider that breaks the camels back and your choice to not do B making it impossible for A to continue to exist, that still does not imply that you are morally responsible for the end of A. You contributed to the end of A, that cannot be denied, but you are not to blame for the end of A. You can only be held accountable for the end of A if you also are both aware of A’s dependence on B and determined A’s dependence on B.
So for advertisement, it’s clear. The program content being provided to consummers does not have to depend up the efficacy of advertisement. That’s just what the program content providers decided to do and consumers unasked went along with it and have generally been happy with the consequences. But if for some reason consumers choose not to watch the advertisements any more, that does not make them to blame for the content no longer being able to be supported by advertisements. That’s just a case of a failed system of support that didn’t work because the people didn’t want it. The content producers can always try something else or they can give up and not produce the content, either way it isn’t out business and we shouldn’t particularly care at least as far as conscience goes. We should feel no moral dilemma for acting naturally as consumers do to select content we prefer and filter out that which we do not.
Advertisers are trying to create a system where you have a moral or social incentive to force yourself to experience content that you do not want to experience. That is in the system they are foisting on us, a person who skips advertisements will be rejected by society as a ‘bad person’ or a ‘freeloader’ and so as a natural result we’ll just watch it all in order to avoid being branded as such. That’s the basic implication of these policies. Of course that’s very good for advertisers since they don’t even have to try particularly hard to make advertisements that people actually want to see. And it’s good new for content providers since they don’t have to even think particularly hard about how best to fund their endeavors. It’s only bad news for you and me since we are stuck with bad advertisements that we are forced to experience and we cannot even exercise our natural freedom of choice in order to force the providers to alter or improve it without being branded a thief.
Look what it basically boils down to is this. No one has a right to tell you what you can and can’t experience with your senses that are before you. If you want to turn off your television during the commercials and turn it back on when the show comes back you can. If you want to walk away from your tv and do something else during the commercials you can. No one would dare say you are being immoral by watching the content while not giving the advertisers their due.
At least nobody would have in the past.I’m not sure now though. Maybe we are getting closer to a crazy society where that is the case. Parents will teach children not to ‘flip’ channels because only ‘bad people’ don’t watch the advertisements when they are watching the show. The people who create the content will have chains bounds to our eyeballs pulling them hither and thither making us see the things that they want us to see with no control of our own as the ‘price’ for free content. I don’t know about you, but such a world sounds pretty sick and repulsive to me. I hope we aren’t heading there.
Principles of feedom have to supersede profits. If technology develops that makes advertisements effectively obsolete, and consumers choose to use it, then advertisers and content providers will just have to find another way to produce their content and make their profits that consumers are willing to be on board with. Who said the current system is written in stone?
