The timing of collection is irrelevant. If I have to pay, and you have to pay, they should have to pay. The fight seems to be over loopholes/kickbacks they felt entitled to use.

geohot didn't enable/endorse/provide piracy. he merely exposed a flaw, and took steps to specifically release and detail it that wouldn't allow you to use it for piracy. he's a hardware hacker in the old-school sense of wanting to learn, pick apart, see how things work and make them do what he wants, just to do it.

the fact others have used his work to further piracy isn't his fault and shouldn't be blamed on him.

To be honest I started using adblocker not because i didn't want to see ads. I didn't care about the banners and such originally. But then came the java applet ads, then the macromedia flash ads and I noticed the slowdown. Thats why I started. Although now I'd keep using it just because its jarring to use IE or a non-AdBlocked Firefox anymore. I noticed the other day when using IE from a machine that wasn't mine that the latest ad technique is a CSS float-over that pops up when your mouse goes over a link and,if you click the link, you're taken to the ad's site instead. Something for MS Live I believe.

Its crap like that that gives the ad industry a bad rep.