Exactly. You recognize this, yet do nothing whatsoever to turn this against them so that it bites them in the ass. You let them continue, and do nothing but whine and complain and bitch, as if it was someone elses job to watch out for your shit. I absolutely do not comprehend that.
Did you miss the OP, wherein it was revealed that he had changed the graphic that was hotlinked to one that called the hotlinkers thieves?
Ah, so it’s up to the person who had their bandwidth stolen to stop the person from stealing?
What the fuck? What part of, “Stealing is wrong” do you not comprehend, assbag?
The short point Voodoochile, as you have been told ad nauseum, is that failing to lock up your stuff does not make stealing it OK. None of us are under any illusions but that webmasters can take steps to secure their sites better than they sometimes do. None of us need to be told that any more. Really. We understand that. We really do.
Theft is still theft even if the victim could possibly have done something to avoid the theft. Theft is still theft if the victim makes an insurance claim. Theft is still theft even if the victim finds a way to sell their story to the papers.
It is not open to thieves to justify their theft by explaining what the victim should have done to avoid the theft or take advantage. What thieves should do is leave other people’s stuff alone.
It’s a simple point. Even idiots and high school/college kiddies understand it. You clearly don’t. What does that make you?
What we are talking about is linking without permission. So the apt analogy is rape. What you are really saying is that in your view the cheerleader who misses her period after being raped shouldn’t cry and wring her hands because it wasn’t rape. After all she could have been on the pill, and she could have just lay back and tried for the big O.
Charming. That’s your position in a nutshell
Wow, you partially get it!
How about asking? If it is so nice and dandy and you are doing us site owners a favor why not fucking ask? Could it be perchance that we will not be so thrilled and will tell you “thanks, but, no thanks”?
If you don’t ask, and the owner hasn’t agreed to it, it is theft!
I love this argument. May please use it this afternoon when I negotiate loading fees with the director of the TV commercial we’re producing? “Why should we pay you to use your work in these extra markets? You’re getting free advertising!” I guess I’m just turned on by the sound of somebody laughing in my face.
Copyright = Right of Copy. In other words, the holder of the copyright, and nobody else, has the right to decide when, where and how his or her work will be (and just as importantly, won’t be) used. Period. It doesn’t matter if you think the copyright holder will benefit from your actions, the decision isn’t yours to make.
Look kids, it makes no difference whether your religous beliefs lead you to think linking is morally wrong or not. Its not illegal, and it wont be in the foreseeable future because there are also a number of legitimate uses for linking.
Its like you fuckwads get to the point where youve decided linking is morally wrong, and then stop as if thats the end of it. Its not the end of it children, there is now the pragmatic reality of what she can or cannot do about it.
What, is crying thats its morally wrong going to stop the linking? Is it going to pay her higher rates for bandwith? Is crying that linking is morally wrong going to do dick but provide a good laugh to all those doing the linking? Pull your immature heads out of your fucking asses. There is no such thing as a moral high ground any more than there is such a thing as god.
The fact of the matter is, whether she puts in scripts to fuck over the linkers or whether she hires a very expensive lawyer to chase down and try to prosecute a few kids for linking to her site, she is going to have to put forth some kind of effort to deal with it. Either fucking way morons, she is going to have to do something to resolve the situation, its not going to get resolved for her. Assuming shes not made of money, I at least attempted to offer her some ideas as to how she can deal with it without paying a fucking snake for their time.
Of all of you shit for brains bleating on and on about ethics this and morals that, have any of you offered her any concrete ideas to help her resolve the situation, or have all of you just offered her fucking pity or your oh-so-sought-after and well thought out moral and ethical judgements? Is your pity, or your fucking pathetically adolescent moral indignation going to help her one fucking bit in dealing with the situation and resolving it?
Is she supposed to pay the higher transfer rates with all the self righteous pompous bullshit that you immature fucking nimrods have offered up? Are your childish in the extreme ethical fucking pronouncements going to cover the cost of a lawyer? No…Why the fuck not? Because all of your ethical and moral bullshit has all the value of shit in diapers, you pretentious pompous fucking idiots.
Snap the fuck out it you fucking dizzy bunch of mental frat brats. Fuckin-a, I dont even agree that its that much of a problem and yet I still have made an attempt to help her come up with ideas to deal with the situation rather than insult her by offering nothing but a bunch of fucking insulting, worthless, mewing fucking platitudes.
Voodoochile, somehow you missed that plenty of solutions have been offered, from changing the image to something offensive or something that calls out the hotlinker as a bandwidth thief, to locking down the images so they can’t be linked to. In ADDITION to these solutions, we discussed our disgust for people who don’t have the common curtesy to behave in a way that makes the internet an enjoyable, accessable and affordable place for all because that’s certainly not what they’re doing when they run up the hosting costs of those they admire. Now, while there are a bunch of different things all of us can try in order to stop hotlinkers exploiting the talent, creativity and hosting arrangements of others, we still would prefer that it wasn’t necessary and that people would just be a bit more thoughtful. There is no excuse for hotlinking as free hosting for images is anyone’s for the taking. The same copyright issues that may prevent someone from uploading an image to their own host should also stop them from hotlinking to the image - unauthorised use is still unauthorised use even if you don’t copy it off the server.
Give me one good reason why any webmaster should not resent hotlinking when services like photobucket are available. (We’ll save the copyright issues for another day and just zero in on the unauthorised bandwidth issue for simplicity’s sake.). After that, give me a good reason why anyone who choses to use another person’s creation for their own purposes shouldn’t take the time to ask permission first. If people simply took the time to ask permission, and when it has been given, host it with someplace like photobucket (or shutterfly, or any of the other zillion similar sites) that are happy to allow hotlinking, then there wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, people are arguing that webmasters should be the ones to put all the work and time and effort in to prevent people from taking their stuff - I just don’t buy that. It simply doesn’t make sense that the person providing the content, the access and the creativity should also have to be happy to either have their work used without permission or consent and often without credit, or to keep jacking up the security on their site. How can people justify demanding even more on top of free access to the sort of content that they enjoy?
Did you read the title of the OP? I switched to a Linux host. I’ve blocked all the hotlinkers and my “sweet (minor) revenge” is the knowledge that all their blogs and avatars are now showing a graphic that declares them to be a bandwidth thief. Some of you here have thought that such an action was “too harsh” or wasn’t right in some way—to make a graphic that would show on their page, telling them (and everyone who saw their page) that they were a thief. To this I say: you’ve got to be kidding. :rolleyes:
By the way, I was so pleased with the results from the first domain switch over, so I’ve switched all of my other domains over (less one) to Linux or Unix, so they can also block hotlinkers. I’ve taken care of that problem. And I’m getting some “sweet revenge” on the thieves while I’m at it. (The one I haven’t switched over has graphics that I seriously doubt will be hotlinked, but if a few are, I can do a graphics switcharoo manually.)
Not all hosts are able to block hotlinkers. I contacted my old host and asked about the problem, and they could do nothing. (I was using NT servers.) Hence, the switch. I have looked up solutions for blocking hotlinkers from a non *nix host, and I found none that would really be effective and inexpensive. Of course, if anyone knows of one that will block hotlinkers from an NT host, and does not require me to alter my html pages or learn some new computer language, I am all ears.
As for the rest of your ranting post, I will not address it. I have faith that others will, and far more effectively than I could.
How old are you Voodoochile?
Actually, look, don’t worry about that question.
When:
you’ve finished giving that strawman a real good thumping (what a guy!), you’ve done with attempting to pump up your ego by solving all of the problems that Yosemite and others have repeatedly told you they already solved without your help, you’ve finished your raving mucho pragmatist act (oooh we are all so impressed, you big strong man you), you’ve tired of calling us names for not knowing stuff that anyone who can read would know we knew already…
Come back. Bring pie. :wally
yosemite: I locked up my stuff so those people who were stealing it can’t anymore. I fixed it so anyone who uses my stuff gets a big sign that says they’re a thief.
Various posters: Cool, good for you. Here are some other suggestions for what you can do.
Other various posters: Is stealing stuff really theft?
Various posters: Yes, stealing stuff is theft.
Other various posters: No it isn’t.
Various posters: Yes it is.
Other various posters: No it isn’t.
Various posters: Yes it is.
Voodoochile: I’m so sick of people whining about this. It boggles my mind that you’re not flattered that people want to take your stuff. And since you’re not,yosemite, you should LOCK IT UP, for god’s sake, and quite WHINING!
yosemite: I did. See up there? I said so in the first post, in fact.
Voodoochile: I mean, c’mon, none of you shit-for-brains are listening; you ought to take the opportunity to put your name on all your stuff, so when it gets stolen everyone can tell where it came from! How come nobody’s made any suggestions for what to do? And, if you don’t want people taking your stuff, LOCK IT UP! There are ways to do that you know. It takes a little work, but geez, don’t just sit there and whine to us about it.
Jenaroph, we are not debating whether stealing stuff is good or bad, we are debating whether hotlinking equals stealing or not. Me says hotlinking =! stealing
This thread needs more analogies.
You see the thing with hotlinking is it is a bit like using the other fisherman’s harpoon without resharpening it after it got blunt because you missed and hit an endangered coral. It is all very well saying the coral is a resource available to everyone. That is not going to impress the local harpoon sevice provider though, is it? I say replace the goddamn harpoon with a chocolate pole vault. Then see who’s bandwidth goes over the 6.0m bar or something. Err, carry on.
Er…
That wasn’t what I was posting about either. My point was, Voodoochile waltzed into a thread without apparently reading it, repeated every point that had already been made and cussed everyone out and called them stupid for not bringing up those points. Which they clearly had, but he had steadfastly refused to notice. He repeatedly lambasted the OP for not taking the action for which she started the thread to announce she had just taken.
I s’pose I could have been more detailed in the reenactment, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a short summary…
Indeed. A thread without analogies is like breakfast without orange juice.
This is my last response. I simply can’t take the sheer weight of the strained analogies which all presuppose that we’re talking about physical theft of actual objects as opposed to simple (and possibly quite rude, I will grant you) overuse of a free service.
Yosemite the “user” I was referring to in my last post was the hotlinker (who is a “user” of your web site), stumbling across your image and loving every last pixel of it, not the user of his web site.
Princhester, if someone put their power plug out with a sign on it that says I can use it (mv wall_socket /www/htdocs/ ; chmod 644 wall_socket), then yes, I’m going to assume I can use it. If they intended it to be for casual use only, then they may have some people take advantage of it, and they might have to change their sign to restrict the conditions under which it can be used. That’s the way it goes.
And Mighty_Girl, even an idiot can understand that by your definition, it is theft for you to visit a web site without asking the owner’s permission first. I think you might need to revise.
Oh, and Voodoochile, you’re not helping.
You’re ducking the point, ntucker. What if there is no sign? What is the default: that it is fair enough to use someone else’s electricity from their powerpoint unless they tell you not to, or the reverse?
And until you have proved that the usual considerations of a civil society don’t apply to the internet as they do to the physical world, analogies using the physical world are entirely apt.
Yosemite has created a refreshing filtered-water stream. She dug down to the groundwater, pumped it up, fashioned hydraulics to create a bubbly, picturesque creek. About 100 yards from the source (which is screened off by trees and undergrowth), she sets up a picnic area, which she lets people use for free. People can drink from the stream, but they need to do so within reason, so that it doesn’t deplete the water supply; and they are asked not to remove the springwater from the area. There are signs placed in strategic areas spelling this out. Perhaps a measured amount of springwater is bottled and sold, to pay for the labor that created it and the time and effort to keep the area clean and open to the public.
Someone sneaks into the screened off area and siphons off the springwater for their own use, perhaps just for personal use, perhaps to share with friends. More and more people discover that the springwater can be siphoned off, some even for commercial sale. Eventually, the spring dries up, and the area becomes a desert.