Why not replace blocked banners with something invisible?
Many users have suggested to us that blocked banners should be replaced by a something like a 1×1 transparent GIF to make the page would look as if there was nothing ever there. Apart from making it harder to catch unintended blocking, this might also displease the owners of the page, who could argue that such a change constitutes a copyright infringement. We think that merely failing to allow an included graphic to be accessed would probably not be considered an infringement: after all this is what happens when a browser is configured not to load images automatically. However, we are not lawyers, so anyone in doubt should take appropriate advice. In a context where the copyright issue is resolved satisfactorily, a proxy could simply return a status 301 or 302 and specify a replacement URL in a Location and/or URI header. An alternative would be to use inline code to return a 1 x 1 clear GIF. We do not publish sample code for this, and we have no way of stopping others who do.
Many users have suggested to us that blocked banners should be replaced by a something like a 1×1 transparent GIF to make the page would look as if there was nothing ever there. Apart from making it harder to catch unintended blocking, this might also displease the owners of the page, who could argue that such a change constitutes a copyright infringement. We think that merely failing to allow an included graphic to be accessed would probably not be considered an infringement: after all this is what happens when a browser is configured not to load images automatically. However, we are not lawyers, so anyone in doubt should take appropriate advice. In a context where the copyright issue is resolved satisfactorily, a proxy could simply return a status 301 or 302 and specify a replacement URL in a Location and/or URI header. An alternative would be to use inline code to return a 1 x 1 clear GIF.
