Did they explicitly set the permissions on their garden furniture to “world usable”? Because that’s what yosemite did with his/her pictures in order to publish them on a web site.
I’m sorry, words would only fail to adequately mock that statement to the extent it needs mocking.
Here’s a few quick smilies that might help though…
:smack: :rolleyes: :wally:
Publishing pictures on a web sites DOES NOT mean “world usable”! It means go to my web page to view my pictures. The whole notion that anything on the web is legally and morally free for the taking is the last refuge of the juvenile, corrupt and clueless.
Actually, a more appropriate analogy might involve a cafe with outdoor seating.
By placing the tables and chairs on the sidewalk, the cafe is inviting the world to come and sit in them. But there is a condition—you can’t just bring your own food. If you want to use their furniture, you need to be a customer at their cafe.
Simiilarly for yosemite’s pictures. She happily shares them with the whole world, but places a condition on their use—you need to be a browser at her website, and you can’t just pick up her stuff and make off with it for your own unrelated purposes.
Are you aware of how the pictures get published on the web site? You put the files in a directory, and you configure the permissions on the filesystem and the web server software to make them “world readable”. I’m not sure how much more explicit you can get.
Let’s take the other approach. Say I have a web site, and I want my files to be accessible by everyone, and I don’t have any weird restrictions about who views them and where. What mechanism am I supposed to use to indicate that? The entire point of the permissions mechanism on a web server is to indicate who you want to grant access to. If you don’t want everyone to have access, make it so. If you grant everyone access, don’t go complaining that everyone takes advantage of it.
So you mean it’s all or nothing? Either anyone should be able to leech anything or ours that they want (that does not belong to them), or else we shouldn’t publish anything on the web?
That’s bullshit. That’s like saying that because I put my purse down for a moment in public, I’m giving “permission” for someone to take it. Or, if I let my cat go oustide, then I’m giving “permission” for someone else to shoot it or do whatever they want to it. I allowed others “access” to it, after all.
And let’s get back to this “permission” thing, while we’re at it. On every page of all of my sites, I specifically say that I do NOT give “permission” for people to steal my work. But people would still hotlink anyway. How can you say that I’m “giving permission” for someone to use my work?
It’s like me leaving something out in my front porch, and leaving a sign in front of it saying, “You are free to enjoy looking at this, but I do not give you permission to use it for your own purposes. You are on the honor system, and I expect that you will not do anything with it other than look at it.” How is someone ethically okay in taking it anyway? They know it doesn’t belong to them, and they know that they didn’t do anything to contribute to it being there (didn’t pay for hosting, didn’t create it). And there’s a frickin’ SIGN telling them that they do not have permission to take it. Just because they can go ahead and take it anyway does not mean that they are ethically right.
I think this is called Deep Linking and you may wish to look here http://stevemorse.org/create/deeplink.htm.
Arguing that hotlinking to one graphic isn’t going to increase a site’s traffic too significantly ignores the possibility that countless sites may hotlink to any of the site’s graphics. While the bandwidth usage by one site may be negligible, eventually the bandwidth usage by many sites is going to add up. At what point do you think the site owner has the right to complain? When they’re pulling 10% of his bandwidth allocation? 25%? 50%? 100%? 200%? There’s no limit to how many people can link back, nor to how much extra they can add to the hosting bill.
Copyright issues are valid but to put them to one side for a moment, I believe there is no need or excuse for hotlinking. There are so many sites out there that host images for free that there’s simply no need to steal someone else’s bandwidth. Obviously if you find an image on the internet that you’re eager to use on your own site the right thing to do is email the owner and ask permission to put it on your site, and, once you have permission, upload it to your own space, and credit the original where ever you use it. Why is that so hard? It seems like there are millions of people out there who are unable to do any of those three little steps.
Webmasters of the world, we are surrounded. Resistance is futile. Let’s just surrender; the idiots have won.
I am flabbergasted. So this is what we are up against, people who at first glance cannot recognize the wrongness of stealing material and bandwidth from us, but that even when confronted with arguments fail to recognize that we are been stolen from. Yikes!
When I first realized that a large site was hotlinking my pictures (I mentioned in another thread) they were swallowing a helluva bandwidth when I plugged off hotlinking and checked the stats I found that there were 24 other websites hotlinking our pictures. About 12 were kids using an image from our store. That was about 25% of the usage in our server. How can anyone fail to see that if things had continued that way we would not be able to sustain our site (who by the way does provide a valuable service) because it is paid from my pocket?
But if hotlinking and stealing material is fair game, can I use some of Signorino’s cartoons? How about I translate Cecil’s material and publish a book in Spanish? After all it is all out for the taking and I would have put a fair chunk of work myself by translating the book. What did I hear? The Chidope legal cavalry? Oops.
I think ntucker was referring to filesystem permissions and the various access restrictions that you can set in Apache. The point being that if you want to stop somebody from accessing a particular file in a particular manner, it is within your power to do so. Ergo, if you don’t put those restrictions in place, you are giving implied consent for anybody to use your stuff in any way they see fit.
Not that I agree with him or anything. If I forget to lock the front door on my way out, I’m not giving implied consent for random jackasses to come in my apartment to watch my TV and scare my cats.
Or, in your case, it’d be posting a bigass NO TRESPASSING sign on your front door, but forgetting to lock it.
dog80’s thoughts on hot-linking:
First: Calling people thieves is not a very good idea, especially when those people have done nothing wrong. Maybe you should change the graphic with something like “Why not visit my website…blah blah blah”
Second: All of the analogies posted here suck. There is simply no real world situation that is analogous to hot-linking.
Third: You cannot make a blanket statement saying that hot-linking is theft, unethical or whatever. For some websites, hot-linking is actually desired. For example, hot-linking a product page from amazon.com means more prospective clients for them.
Fourth, putting stuff on the Internet means that people can and will copy them. If you are so concerned about copyright theft, then either put an incomplete or degraded copy of your work, or don’t put anything at all.
“Nothing wrong”? Well, if stealing is OK with you then yes, nothing wrong.
Well, if you don’t want to understand you will not understand. Me? I prefer my money is not taken by someone I don’t know. Because it IS all about money you know?
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Why not fucking ask then? You cannot frigging take something from me without asking, that’s how it works. If you don’t ask is THEFT!
You can’t justify theft by blaming the victim. Many things are out there for you to see but not to touch. Statues in a park for example.
What do you think about my wish to ‘borrow’ Cecil’s work? It is out there for the taking.
Which is why they not only allow it, they encourage it. Advertising for Amazon doesn’t have any connection to what we’re talking about, and it’s mystifying why the guy who reckons all our analogies suck would mention something that’s not even close to being in the same catagory.
Since this simple fact has apparently been too difficult for you to comprehend, let me state clearly that none of us have any problem with hotlinking to images that have the owners consent to be used in that manner. Absolutely no one has made the argument that site owners can’t consent to their images being hotlinked. We are talking about hotlinking images without consent and expecially when done in defiance of the site owner’s clearly expressed wishes.
And despite your assertion that hotlinkers have “done nothing wrong”, I think you’ll find them in violation of copyright laws. At present (and to the best of my knowledge) there is no law that makes hotlinking to an uncopyrighted image illegal, but just because it’s not illegal it doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do.
Certainly there is the option is to use an “incomplete or degraded copy” or not post on the internet at all, but that’s to the detriment of us all. Those of us who enjoy the material that is shared on the net would not like to see it all removed, cropped or degraded because of a few who are incapable of respecting the creator’s wishes. If Cecil removed all but a few of his best columns in response to Mighty_Girl’s decision to hotlink to his images and use his articles on her own site, all of us would resent and regret the loss.
Yes, I knew what kind of permissions he was talking about. The setting of these features (like editing the htaccess file to prevent hotlinkers) is something (as far as I know) not available to a site being hosted by an NT sever (which is what I was using before).
And I agree with the other things you say. “Allowing” people access to my content by letting them see it is not “permission” when I have a big sign telling them not to take and use my content for themselves. Hell, a person doesn’t have to put up a sign not giving permission—people should simply know that if it isn’t theirs and if they aren’t footing the bill, they should not be taking it.
This is ludicrous. I can replace the graphic that they are hotlinking to with anything I want. It is on my site and I can replace that graphic with any message I choose. If they don’t like it, that’s just too damned bad. Boo hoo hoo. Stop hotlinking then. That’s the price they pay for leeching someone else’s content. They don’t get to control what that content might change into.
Yeah, there really is. It’s simple. These people didn’t pay for it, they didn’t make it, and they’re taking it anyway.
This is news to me. I am an Amazon.com associate. They specifically do not want us to hotlink to product graphics. We are instructed to upload the book cover art (or whatever) to our own servers. We do link to the product page, but that is not hotlinking. Now, some other Associate programs do track hits and links by telling you to plug in code that hotlinks to a small 1x1 pixel graphic (or in some places, a banner ad), but they get to choose which graphics are hotlinked (and the size of these graphics), and they have to give us permission first. We don’t decide for them.
Parking your car on the street means that anyone can steal it. So what does that prove? That people are thieves? Yeah, we knew that.
On Hot-Linking: If I visit the forum that has hot-linked yosemite’s image, then technically I am the one who steals her bandwidth. But there is no (reasonable) way for me to know that beforehand. It’s not my fault.
On analogies: My point is that websites are not houses, purses left on the side of the road or free photo booths. So things like tresspassing or theft do not apply in the same way in the internet.
I have an analogy of hotlinking that I believe is much better than the previous ones: Imagine you put a big sign in front of your home that says “Free Beer Inside!”. All doors and windows are wide open and anybody can come into your house. Some people will come in from the front door, but some will come in from the window (hotlinking). If you don’t want people coming in from the window then you can simply lock it.
Another (slightly irrelevant) analogy: Suppose somebody is going down a street, trying the doors of the houses until he finds an unlocked one (port scaning). Suppose he finds an unlocked door (port) and he steals everything from that house (website).
In the case of the unlocked house, it is called theft and that person can be prosecuted.
In the case of the unlocked site, it is called shoddy administration and all they can do is to suck it up and lock their site the next time. On the internet, if it is open, then you can enter. Is it wrong or unethical? I don’t think so, because the internet has no clear cut borders. If real-world laws applied on the internet, you could be “tresspassing” and not even know of it.
If hotlinking is such a big issue for you, then you can simply disallow it. But don’t make blanket statements like “hotlinking is theft” or whatever.
Well gee I guess you could include them in a page that says: 'Freely hotlink to these files if you want".
My emphasis.
You haven’t been here long, have you SpaceDog? 
Nobody is saying it is your (the web page viewer’s) fault. It’s the fault of person who puts the hotlinking code there.
Let’s try this analogy: There’s a sign that says “Free Beer Inside! Come in this door.” On the (open) window on the side, there is a sign that says, “Don’t use this window to come inside.” When people do that anyway, they are acting in an unethical way.
It’s shoddy administration and someone who is behaving in an unethical manner by snooping around where they don’t belong.
If you are specifically told not to, yes. If you know that you are costing someone else money, and you know that they very likely would not give you permission if asked, then, once again, yes. It’s unethical. And selfish.
So a person who has a site which says, “Don’t hotlink this” is to be ignored, because the Internet has no clear cut borders? Poppycock. Anyone who can view a site and read can figure out that they are viewing someone else’s site, and they know that they didn’t host for that, they know that they didn’t create the content on that site. And they can also read the messages on that site that say “Don’t take this.” To take it anyway is unethical.
I have.
I can do whatever I want. And so can many webmasters, because that’s exactly how we feel about it. I can also most definitely replace all my hotlinked graphics with graphics that call hotlinkers thieves. Are you telling me that I shouldn’t do that? That I shouldn’t replace my own graphics with anything else I want to, including a graphics which tells anyone who looks at the hotlinker’s site that they are a thief? If so, why? I have a right to do anything I want to with the content on my site.
Whatever rocks your boat
Sure, but if you buy stolen goods in circumstances where you don’t know, and have no reasonable way of knowing, that the goods are stolen you have not committed a crime. The same cannot be said of the person who sells the goods to you knowing they are stolen.
This analogy is bullshit because in both cases the person getting the credit for the free beer is you. Whether by the window or the door.
But let’s build on your analogy. Suppose your house has a front door and a back door.
At the front door you have a sign saying “Free Beer”. And another sign that says “Home brewed by me” and you sit by the sign and enjoy lapping up the praise from the samplers of your beer (analogous to amateur websites). Or perhaps the sign says “If you like our beer, why not buy a whole case” with the beer company logo under it (analagous to commercial websites).
And suppose you live in an unusual gated estate in which you are charged by the number of visitors to your house.
And suppose I come along, note that the back door is unwatched and unlocked. And I put up exactly the same signs except with me sitting by them/my company logo on them. Giving away your free beer, but I get all the credit.
Fair? Of course not.
Your own analogy shows what bollocks your position is. You explain very nicely why theft is wrong, whether an unlocked house or an unsecured port. You then totally fail to explain why one should be regarded as theft and not the other. You seem to feel that just because something is a frontier and you can get away with more, that should be less illegal or immoral.
Real world laws do apply to the internet. Find me the bit in any law that says “except on the internet”.
Bzzzt.
What you described is illegal in at least twelve states.
I know that if you somehow managed to break in to my employer’s network, through an unsecured port or not, and we managed to track you down, we’d do our best to press as many charges as the prosecutor would let us.
Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you may.
Shit, if I used an RPC vulnerability to 0wnz j00r Windows box, and snooped your porn collection or used it to send out twenty million emails advertising male enhancement products and the hot teens who appreciate them, are you trying to tell me that it’s not illegal or at least unethical? If you didn’t want your system turned in to a spam relay, you should have patched.