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Comment by AretNCarlsen | Hacker News Reader

@everybody: "This way we can disable Internet access on apps and games that are just downloading ads."

In The Business, we call this "piracy". Unless, of course, the developer is an altruist who did not intend to monetize their app, but accidentally dropped in an ad window.

Like web browser ad blockers, I expect that developers will ignore this UNLESS it begins to eat into their general user base. Then will come the code libraries that try to guess whether the permissions are accurate or not (e.g. timeout on internet connectivity downtime).

Or fewer free apps, I suppose. Either solution fits the new game theory equilibrium. My money is on "Google is not going to martyr their ad-supported app developers by rolling this into their Android OS builds", with a distant second to "faux-permissions detection libraries".

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I agree that blocking ads means less money for developers who hope to monetize their apps that way. What I strongly disagree with is calling it "piracy". I find that statement to be borderline trolling.

There's a reason why even you, in your comment, used the word "monetize" instead of outright "sell". Mind that I'm not arguing about the dictionary definition of the word, but about the intent behind its usage.

If I went into your application and disabled or circumvented some sort of mandatory payment mechanism, I would be pirating it. If, however, I decide that I do not want to give your application permission to access Internet and your application does not object to this, then I'm just exercising my rights.

Likewise, web browser ad blockers are just my way of exercising my rights to filter the content I don't want to see, which is analogous to restricting access to certain sites on my kid's computer or, heck, changing the channel briefly while the ads are on TV.

I use "monetize" as a superset of "sell", in that "sell" is usually taken to imply a direct payment by the end user, whereas "monetize" also provides for indirect payments like ad views.

You are allowed to decide not to give my application permission to access the internet; the Android Market actually forces you to review the permissions my app requests before allowing installation. The piracy here is that the Cyanogen mod pretends to give internet access, but lies to my application (by lying to the app and pretending that the internet is just unavailable for the moment.)

Maybe I misunderstood the post, but I believe that you can't fake internet access permission. The way I read it is that the data you were supposed to be able to fake was stuff like phone serial number.

As for the "piracy" argument, the line is, as always, blurry. I guess that I could agree to calling it "piracy" if your app somehow verifies whether you have access to a resource on a server and shuts down if you don't, thus preventing me from using your app if I don't "pay" by displaying ads. The fact that I dislike that practice doesn't mean that circumventing it should not be called piracy.

It's not lying. The Internet is unavailable to your app, and it tells your app that. Now, it may be unavailable because the user said, "make the Internet unavailable" instead of being unavailable because the phone is inside a tunnel... but the end result is the same. An action the user took caused your app to be unable to contact the Internet. If this is a problem, pop a dialog saying, "hey, get out of that tunnel if you want to play my game."

The "permissions" that a user gives to the device say that the app has permission to use the Internet. The permission does not make the Internet magically 100% available. It may well never be available. All you're getting is permission to use the Internet if the Internet happens to exist.

Anyway, I know you're trolling, and that's fine. Because your opinion doesn't matter: it's my phone, my internet connection, and my open-source firmware. Your software is an invited guest. If you don't want your app to run on my phone, don't let it get on my phone. Once you've done that, it's mine to take with me into tunnels (virtual or otherwise) whenever the fuck I want, and there's not a thing in the world you can do to stop me. My house, my rules, so fuck you. Hahahaha!

Imagine you were visiting a free art exhibition and someone was constantly shouting "BUY THIS PURSE BUY IT NOW!" into your ears. Probably a bad analogy but maybe you get my mindset.

If you cannot sell your product, well, maybe it is not worth running after profit. If you do not feel like sharing it for free, maybe someone else will.

I do not consider anything with advertisements (or "submit your mail adresse to get the download link") to be free. The ad publisher is getting my attention, personal data or whatever, it is not free of drawbacks for me.

Disabling parts of an application can hardly be considered piracy.

Let me play devil's advocate here for a moment.

You say that you don't "consider anything with advertisements (or "submit your mail adresse to get the download link") to be free", so you consider your agreeing to these things to be your payment for the software/service/whatever, right? If so, by not viewing the ads, giving your email, etc, you're not paying the price for the product and are thus pirating it.

You use a service that charges your credit card when you use it, but you realize that you can block the call to the server that does the charging and use it just fine. Is that acceptable? It's technologically equivalent to ad blocking in reverse and blocks payment; the only difference is that the currency is USD or EUR rather than eyeballs.

Ha, good catch. My argument crumbles to dust.

Yeah, not a great analogy.

So is disabling the nag screen in a shareware app piracy? What about removing the time limit from a 30 day trial?

It's unfortunate that people are voting you down just because they disagree with your opinion.

It's a totally fair point. What's the difference between downloading a free app and blocking the ads versus pirating an app outright?

I don't know about others who downvoted the comment, but I know I didn't do so because I disagree, but because I believe that it's deliberately flawed and inflammatory. See my reply to the downvoted comment to find my explanation of why I believe that.

Is the word "piracy" considered troll-bait now? I thought that was the kindest available euphemism for "taking a not-free thing for free".

If you are distributing your app in the App Market, than your app is listed as "free".

What is the kindest euphemism for people who lie about their product?

Isn't that a bit like arguing that it's OK to pirate Photoshop because it costs too much?

I think it would be nice if Google indicated in the market which apps are ad-supported, but I don't think it changes the fundamentals.

Not even remotely. Photoshop has a well defined sticker price. It is well established (at this point) that in order to get a legitimate copy of Photoshop, you have to pay said sticker price.

There are no EULA agreements that people agree to when downloading free apps.

Furthermore, when an app is 'ad-supported' it is not clear at all what agreement you have implicitly engaged in. Have you agreed to allow ads to collect data that you enter into the app itself? Is the author only receiving funds if you click on the ads? Are you morally obligated to click on the ads then? If not, how is my decision to never click on ads any different than blocking them outright? How much data from the app to the marketers is being collected? If I plan a trip with your app, are sponsoring companies receiving this information as well? Are ads simply keyword identified or are they using a profile?

Without transparency about how the ads provide funding (which actually violates Google ad words TOS) I don't see how this is a simple black and white situation. I believe most people operate on the assumption that the ads are "you click, I get paid". As a result, most people view ad supported applications as a variation of donationware. If you don't want donations to be optional, don't use this method.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not really talking about the law.

You raise some really excellent points about privacy and ads that I totally agree with. But if you don't want ads in your ad-supported app, I think the only fair thing to do is not use it. In the same sense the it's only fair to pay for shareware that you routinely use, even if there's no DRM and you're not legally or functionally obligated to do so.

If there's actually a concrete claim you want to make, something more precise like "copyright infringement" or "violating the license agreement" is probably better. If you aren't accusing them of anything in particular but wish to express disapproval, it would be best just to call it "morally wrong" — though I don't think that would make for a very productive discussion.

"Piracy" is a political term used generically to mean "people not doing what I want who should be made to obey me by force of law." It may refer to actually harmful illegal acts (bootlegging) or things that are simply not preferable for somebody's business model (watching legally obtained content on an "unauthorized" device).

That's precisely the crux of the problem. Is your app marketed as "free"? If it is, how can I pirate it?

It's not that I consider the word itself a troll-bait, but the misuse of it. Like other commenters already noted, there are other terms that apply to what you're complaining about. Claiming that people are "pirating" an ad-supported application seems to me like a misuse of an already widely-misused word.

On the other hand, if you're arguing that ad-supported applications should not be considered or labeled or marketed as "free", then all I can say is that dragging piracy into the discussion is not the way to support that argument. The flaw, in this case, would be in confusing the cause with effect, just like saying "It's not free because you're stealing it!"

The cause-effect relationship is exactly the point. IRL, I am an app developer. When I deliver a new app, I have two ways to monetize my development time: I can either charge money for the app (and call it the "Pro" version), or I can put ads in the app (and call it "Lite"). If someone ends up with a copy of the app that they did not pay money for (Pro) and does not show my ads (Lite), that is pirating. Whether you stole a copy of the "Pro" version or circumvented the trust I placed in the OS (to make the internet available for ad delivery whenever feasible) does not change the fact that you have broken our (admittedly loose) agreement and stolen my software from me.

I agree that it is entirely possible for the user see no ads in the Lite version anyway, perhaps because they actually don't have an internet connection. Similarly, it is entirely possible for Paypal to make some mistake and fail to credit my account properly for a purchase of the Pro version. My advertisers might by paying by click-through rather than views, in which case I am operating on a statistical basis and not making any money off of many of my users. Those details do not change the ethics and do not cancel out the wrongness of pirating.

(@chc suggests that I should say "morally wrong" instead of "pirating". I think that sounds kinda ad hominem, so I've stuck with "pirating".)

By this logic, muting TV commercials is also piracy.

circumvented the trust I placed in the OS (to make the internet available for ad delivery whenever feasible)

That's not something you can or should be able to "trust" the OS to do. It's not your hardware. If you don't want "pirates" running your app, then have it refuse to run unless it can download ads. Don't pretend you have any right to dictate whether the user is allowed to disable Internet access.

It's an arms race. Smart developers will pre-load adds if this becomes a widely adopted practice. That way, users who have blocked internet access or happen to be out of coverage will still see ads.

I doubt that this will be as big of an issue among general consumers.

Also, why is it a bad thing for users to disable internet access on increasingly limited data plans? I know of many people who use ABP on computers with slow connections. I doubt many developers are hurting because users on slow connections aren't seeing ads on their apps.

already possible with droidwall.

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