Topic: [2016-04-07]Brave says publishers have ‘fundamentally misunderstood’ it (Read 204 times)

Ad-blocking browser Brave says publishers have ‘fundamentally misunderstood’ it

“anonymous” ads through its own ad network. Now juggernauts in the media industry — Newspaper Association of America members Advance Local, Digital First Media, Dow Jones, Gannett, Lee Enterprises, the New York Times Co., Tribune Publishing, and McClatchy — are fighting back.

“Your apparent plan to permit your customers to make Bitcoin ‘donations’ to us, and for you to donate to us some unspecified percentage of revenue you receive from the sale of your ads on our sites, cannot begin to compensate us for the loss of our ability to fund our work by displaying our own advertising,” the publishers wrote in the letter. They specifically said they don’t want to participate in the system Brave has laid out for providing compensation to certain publishers.

Here’s Brave’s full response to the letter:

The NAA sent a letter to Brave Software that is filled with false assertions. The NAA has fundamentally misunderstood Brave. Brave is the solution, not the enemy.

The NAA’s letter to Brave Software asserts that any browser that blocks and replaces ads on the browser user’s device performs “unauthorized republication” of Web content. This is false on its face, since browsers do not “republish”, serve, syndicate, or distribute content across the Internet or to any computer other than the one on which they run.

Browsers are the end-point for secure connections, the user agent that actually mediates and combines all the pieces of content, including third-party ads and first-party publisher news stories. Browsers can block, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source. If it were the case that Brave’s browsers perform “republication”, then so too does Safari’s Reader mode, and the same goes for any ad-blocker-equipped browser, or the Links text-only browser, or screen readers for the visually impaired.

The NAA letter also falsely asserts that Brave will share an “unspecified percentage of revenue”, when our revenue share pie chart has been public and fixed from our first preview release in January. We give the lion’s share (pun intended), up to 70% of ad revenue, to websites, keeping only 15% for ourselves and paying 15% to our users...



http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/07/ad-blocking-browser-brave-says-publishers-have-fundamentally-understood-it/