Implicit agreements for everything are a side effect of our idiotic and corrupt legal system.
Imagine going to a car lot and having a salesman walk up and say "our TOS say by walking onto a lot you have to buy something, you owe us. Didn't you read them? they are behind that dumpster over there duh. Its on page 53 paragraph 10"
Its really shady to link to some other resource on your domain in small print that is full of legal mumbo jumbo and pretend that constitutes any real agreement between you and somebody else. And yes I understand that all those Judges and lawyers who make a living off of making this crap up disagree with me.
For what ifs - What if you sending me a document without charge or explicitly asking for payment first did not imply that I "have" to download some other document that will annoy me and possible infect my computer.
I think this is a red herring. Yes, there are a million absurd examples of "implicit agreements" that one can think of. There are also many legitimate examples-- for instance, you shouldn't go into a bookstore and take pictures of all the pages in a book even though you haven't explicitly agreed not to and the store owners allowed you onto their premises.
So, is "if you're going to use my website, don't block ads" absurd? I don't think so, and if it's not then your comment is irrelevant to this discussion.
I'm not trying to create a law, I'm trying to discuss whether the individual ad block user bears any moral or ethical responsibility to the content provider. The argument offered here implies their interaction with the content host exists in a completely neutral moral plane because it's mediated by technology. I'm not convinced.
Imagine going to a car lot and having a salesman walk up and say "our TOS say by walking onto a lot you have to buy something, you owe us. Didn't you read them? they are behind that dumpster over there duh. Its on page 53 paragraph 10"
Its really shady to link to some other resource on your domain in small print that is full of legal mumbo jumbo and pretend that constitutes any real agreement between you and somebody else. And yes I understand that all those Judges and lawyers who make a living off of making this crap up disagree with me.
For what ifs - What if you sending me a document without charge or explicitly asking for payment first did not imply that I "have" to download some other document that will annoy me and possible infect my computer.