Short Version: Sometimes I steal bandwidth. Sometimes, mind.
Long Version: I post on a couple of other message boards which enable images in posts. Up until recently, I used to be scrupulous in not stealing bandwidth. I’d save the image, upload it to a hosting site, and then post the link to that. But that is a major pain in the arse when you just want to make a quick post. I’m posting relatively small files - moderate-sized .jpegs and not video or anything like that. The message boards are much smaller than this one, so the number of hits isn’t huge. I won’t hotlink to something like some kid’s Geocities site (not that they’d have anything I want anyway) because those free sites are tough on their “owners” for exceeding daily allowances, but in this day and age of cheap and often free hosting, I can’t see a problem with hotlinking to an image from some bigger dot com site that is going to be viewed by maybe a hundred or so people before the thread dies. I still won’t post if it’s something where the original site clearly wants that image presented in context, but apart from that I don’t feel too guilty these days.
Am I being terribly evil here? I certainly wouldn’t mind somebody else doing the same thing to images on my site. I like to think it’s part of the communal nature of the internet.
BTW, I’m not interested in the copyright issue. We’ll assume public domain for the purposes of this discussion.
Both the law and philosophy are not handling these things well at all right now. We will soon be in an age where we expect to pick up an a wireless signal in most public places. That could be a felony if we or our computer picks the wrong one out of many available if the laws are taken literally. The entire web depends on things being linked so stealing bandwidth is unavoidable and generally intended by design. You can’t really look at the technicalities of how things stand now because they are contradictory and unworkable. I suppose, like always, simple etiquette has to stand in as the measure of proper behavior.
It’s not a huge issue according to who? In some gaming communities it’s still a big issue. I have friends who have had to close their websites because of it. They have the website as a hobby and three days into the month the site is down or they’re hit with a bill. I’m not going to go into why people may want to disable right clicking or prevent people from hotlinking but there are valid reasons why people don’t want to do this. Is it really a lot to ask that people not hotlink?
What exactly is the point of hotlinking when it’s so easy and takes about a minute to host the image yourself? If you posted the hotlinked picture at a board I’m part of we delete the post with a warning. Many boards do this.
The issue shouldn’t be about the owner finding a different server or trying to disable hotlinking, but why do it in the first place?
Hotlinking exposes yourself and the owner of the fora you use when doing it to the possibility of being. goatsed (SFW, text only link, but contains clearly labled links to NOT SFW images)
Every person that has a website is rich? We aren’t talking about stealing food to feed starving children. We’re talking about pixels.
If it’s too painfully hard to put the image on photobucket yourself you could drop an email to the owner of the website and ask if they mind hotlinking. Good luck finding anyone that says you can.
My analogy was:stealing a few dollars : very rich person :: hotlinking : site with cheap, plentiful bandwidthI’m making no claims about the wealth of website owners. If, to the OP, it’s okay to steal a little bit of money from a wealthy person who has wads of unused cash sitting around, then it’s okay to hotlink to a site that has wads of unused bandwidth sitting around. Or, as in my point of view, neither is okay.
Look at terms of your home or your car. Do you think it’'s right to have to lock your doors so people don’t take what is yours? Or is it just a given you do this do prevent theft?
If you just went shopping and have a brand new leather jacket in a bag do you leave that bag outside the bathroom door when you go for a piss? No. You bring it in or have someone watch it.
Do you leave your wireless router at home open so anyone can log in and use it?
It’s the same thing IMO.
To stop theft of your website content, you only need to add 4-5 lines in Apache’s .htaccess file. It’s easy to do (one file, a few lines, ftp’d to your site), well documented (with Apache docs and about a billion websites on the topic), has been around for years, and most proper webhosts allow you to do it.
It’s YOUR bandwidth (car stereo, television, coin collection, leather jacket) and YOU have to take steps (door locks, car alarm, common sense) to protect it.
The boards I post hotlinked pictures on are very small and specialised (eg. an Australian rail enthusiasts’ board). In my mind, this is a bit different from some huge global phenomenon like online gaming. I have hotlinked to my own webspace and also to my sister’s (where I had photos stored), and even in the bad old days when space and bandwidth was more expensive, neither of us ever heard anything from our ISPs regarding going even close to any limits. There were certainly no charges. As I said, I won’t hotlink to those sites which have rather draconian limitations on their users (Geocities etc). I’ve seen simple links to an entire site come up with “Sorry, this user has exceeded his or her bandwidth” messages because somebody has posted a site link on the SDMB, yet somehow that is legitimate where hotlinking one jpeg from a large, established site isn’t. I don’t really follow that.
I could of course be trying to justify my own actions here. I’m aware of that, so I’ll continue to watch this thread closely and if the opinion is overpoweringly anti, then I’ll go back to hosting.
My basic premise is this: Hosting a pic myself isn’t devilishly hard or anything, but it’s a hassle in terms of just making a quick off-the-cuff post to a message board. Granted, only a slight hassle, but with bandwidth so incredibly cheap these days, are we facing a situation where I can do it, and I can accept having it done to me for mutual convenience? I suspect we are, but who am I to say?
I’m not sure why your saying that bandwidth is incredibly cheap for everyone. If I have a website that charges a certain amount if I go over the alloted bandwith or my site is closed unless I purchase more bandwith you can see why I wouldn’t be thrilled if someone is hotlinking from my site.
You have no real idea how much traffic the site your hotlinking the images has.
If you think it’s small, why not email them for permission?
I have friends that have websites that offer usermade content for games. They pay for the website themselves and spend hours making the content that’s available for download. More than once they’ve been hit with bills or their website has been closed down because they’ve found out that a forum has hotlinked a picture of the download. It’s a huge hassle trying to contact forums, many are Russian or foreign forums to try to get them to remove the pictures. It’s gotten so that half the time people close their sites or put their content on paysites. It’s been a huge problem. Yes, I’m aware that you can disable right-clicking so people won’t steal pics, but in this case they allow pictures to be used of their content as long as someone hosts the picture.
If you are aware of what your doing is wrong or at the very least unethical, why do it if it’s easy to remedy? This forum doesn’t have graphics but most forums that do have rules against hotlinking. Maybe it isn’t a problem in your situation and you don’t mind or the person your hotlinking from doesn’t mind. I’m just saying that it’s not always the case.
One is free (though perhaps unwelcome) advertising, the other is theft.
A link to a web page provides the viewer with the page owner’s full intent… advertising, if present, enthusiasm for their hobby, etc. For that, the site owner is willing to foot the bill. Hot linking an image removes all context, and costs the owner of the image money while removing any reason for financing the bandwidth.