I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there are more severe actions taken against circumventing paid material (content behind a paywall) than there is for free content supplemented by advertisements..
Edit : The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.
Given how liberally the DMCA is applied, you definitely don't want to be on the wrong side of that.
I remember some guy that wrote a WoW bot and got sued using the DMCA, with the argument that his bot was circumventing the anti-cheat and the anti-cheat could be seen as a 'mechanism protecting copyrighted material', because it was safeguarding access to the game servers, the servers were generating parts of the game world (such as sounds) dynamically, and those were under copyright... Wild stuff.
It happened to Honorbuddy, a very advanced bot for World Of Warcraft made by a German company. The argument in relation to DMCA was that the bot was circumventing warden, the games anti-cheat system. The legal battle was long and they ultimately had to strip many features of the bot, until the company went under.
Isn't anything that can be circumvented ineffective?
Or, looking at it the other way, if you put a small sticker that says "do not do X" and even one person follows that, isn't that therefore an "effective" method?
> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.
Edit : The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.