Maybe I should have read “The rolleyes concerto” first. Man that thread is slow! 
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.
Sorry I’m late.
One thing, the smilies that I have been using come from a page on Tripod. The girl who created the site gave permission for people to use the smileys on message boards. In fact, that was the very purpose of her site. Doesn’t that make it ok?
I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!
I would hope so, Cess; from time to time, I’ve been using the old version of the colon-D smiley, which Gaudere put on her website so we could keep on using it if we didn’t like the new one.
IMHO, if it’s public domain and not overly large, no harm, no foul.
That’s pretty much how we’ve conducted ourselves here and it’s not a bad policy.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The Straight Dope
Back to the top!
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The Straight Dope
ZenBeam is right, bandwith is a non-issue. The .gif file in question is only 7.55 KB in size, and once stored in client-side cache, is not requested again from the server no matter how many times it is referenced on a page.
Anyone who is unconvinced, however, is welcome to use my bandwidth. Be aware that I had no part in the creation of this .gif, and permission to mirror it has been neither sought nor granted:
http://publish.hometown.aol.com/patron1/myhomepage/smileyshot2.gif
Let’s be a little more specific here, shall we?
Bandwidth is NOT a “non-issue” – it might be for THAT one file, on THIS site alone, to ONE particular site owner, but if people across the Net are referencing that one file on all of the boards they frequent, that tiny KB file suddenly turns into several MB worth of drain on the host’s server. Not only is that file drawn for everyone that uses it, but then it’s drawn again for every person that reads that board, multiplying the bandwidth usage further. Then multiply it AGAIN for all of the folks that do a lot of surfing and regularly empty their caches.
“Oh, no, it’s no big deal, it’s only 4 K.”
Uh huh.
“But officer, I only took 20 bucks out of the register. That doesn’t make it stealing, right?”
BZZZZ, thank you for playing.
I know it sounds damn harsh, but put it into perspective: What if it WASN’T a 4 K file? What if it was a 50, or 100, or 300 K file? (Oh, I shudder at the thought of THAT image) What if your webserver charged you for every K over a certain MB of bandwidth per month? What if that bandwidth was now several gig over your bandwidth limit?
It’s suddenly costing that person a whole lot of money. Their host could cancel their account (happens quite a bit, especially on higher traffic sites when people either don’t realize what directly linking to images can do, or just plain don’t care because “it’s only a little file.”
And if you’re costing me money that I wouldn’t otherwise be spending, that sounds like stealing to me.
Don’t get me wrong. If a site says “Sure, go ahead! Link to my images directly! I’m independantly wealthy!,” then big deal, right? Not really. So they have one of those unlimited bandwidth deals. Guess what? Servers will still cancel you if your bandwidth is totally outrageous. They have the right to do that.
You know what else? If the person that hosts that file off their server does NOT want you to “borrow” their images, they can take it a whole lot further. A few nice letters can get YOUR site shut down for stealing bandwidth, and your ISP cancelled. ISPs really don’t like having their clients reported for fraud, theft, or harassment. Trust me on this one, because I’ve sent more than a few of those letters out myself.
Yes, I take this issue personally. I have multiple websites, and camgirls have a really tough time of it because our sites are very graphics intensive. If someone sets up their own site to “show us off” – ha – and then it’s visited several hundred times a day, drawing on multiple 12-30 K images, we’d go broke fast.
I guess my point in all of this is that, cough, size doesn’t matter. Without permission, it’s still wrong. Overdoing it is still wrong, and you have to realize that it’s not just one instance in a lot of cases (like the smileys). Do you really think that the people registered to this board are the only ones on the Net that think that particular file is really cool?
It adds up, and it is most definitely important to a whole lot of people that run commercial, or even small and controlled personal sites. Argue all you want about it over one small single issue, but it’s that great big picture that causes the real problem.
Surf smart, and don’t add to the problem. Don’t think that it’s okay just because it’s a small file, or someone else does it.
Please?
I just haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.
Gee, I thought the forum was About this message board.
We’ve all been very clear that we’re talking about a single instance and how it affected THIS message board, if at all (it didn’t).
Suzeanna, your points may be vaild, but would be better placed in a GQ in a thread dealing with bandwidth issues in general.
When will all the rhetorical questions end?
A: It’s Suzeanne.
B: When someone makes a blanket statement that’s it all right to do it, then it DOES affect this message board.
Get over it.
We’re supposed to be FIGHTING ignorance here, not bloody well contributing to it, and allowing people to assume that it’s no big deal to steal bandwidth is contrary to what this site is all about.
See, insular as you might want THIS board to be, it’s still part of a greater whole, and by allowing OUR board, where we should be all nice law abiding netizens (yeah, right), to contribute to a huge problem, is a Bad Idea.
Of course, since your post had NOTHING to do with the topic whatsover except to complain about my, GASP, daring to post on the issue, maybe you should just meander off to MPSIMS or the Pit where you might be better received.
Crap like this just reminds me why I hardly ever post. Ignorance is winning, and it makes me sick.
Gee, I am SO sorry, I’ll take my totally irrelevant facts somewhere else.
I just haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.
Hang in there Suzeanne, there are some of us here that understand. Some people just seem to want to make numbers out of things. How much does it cost, what is the impact, how much bandwidth is it using, and on and on.
They just won’t stop to think that using something of someone else’s without their knowledge and permission is wrong. That may be up for debate, but not by me. I understand it completely.
They are trying to debate that stealing a pack of gum is ok, but stealing a car isn’t. Well, that’s why we all pay more for things because of shoplifters.
I personally have the faith that if people know the right way, the better way, the acceptable way, then they’ll choose it. That’s why I brought this up and that’s why others have re-enforced it.
Hopefully, there is enough information here that the people who want to know the better way to do things can understand how to. If not, I hope they keep asking questions to help get an understanding.
To those that think it’s ok to steal a pack of gum, then this probably doesn’t mean much anyway.
Hey, these posts are getting bytewise larger than smilies.
If you take something from a shop, they can’t sell it. If you duplicate reflect or an image, nothing has left the shop, and they can sell the image whenever they want to.
And the issues of bandwidth and copyright seemed be completely intermingled and befuddled in the mess that is this thread. It’s wasted bandwidth.
Ray
Suzeanne:
Okay, let’s be specific.
What we are talking about is a small .gif file, unleashed upon the public domain, intended for use on a bulletin board. The bulletin board in question–owned by ArsTechnica–is a PC enthusiasts’ forum, and they anticipate all manner of code-tweaking from their members (of which I am one). As they say, they are “not English majors who’ve decided to pretend [they] know something”. If a rottweiler doesn’t like what you’re doing to it, he’ll bite you on the ass. It’s presumptuous of you and JimB to police others on their behalf.
What we are not talking about is stealing gum, hijacking a car, or a bunch of teenagers hacking past Adult Check to get a glimpse of some 38-H breasts. You can continue generalizing to encompass larger and larger perspectives of behaviors until you’ve drawn a parallel between gang rape and the fair use of a .gif that was intended for distribution over the internet; such an argument, while tenable, is by no means sound.
To be sure, it is a pain in the ass–if not impossible–to police the distribution of a wallpaper one has slaved over or images of one giving Tommy Lee a blowjob. Such is the price of exhibitionism, and I’m afraid your refusal to recognize that is as demonstrative of ignorance as anything else that has been posted herein.
JimB said
I’d like to add that some of us don’t understand (or didn’t) but are learning.
When I posted the shooting smilie I thought as Nano and Patron apparently do: that anyone who created such a thing expected and hoped that the image would be spread, on the theory that people would see where it came from and be drawn to the source. And I consider myself one of the principal defenders of intellectual property rights on this board. I was just jaded because the companies I deal with on a day to day basis buy OC3s and would happily trade some bandwidth for a possibility of a customer.
What I’ve learned is that while my theory may be true in some instances, it is incumbent on the potential user of an image to get an assurance of that truth with a statement from the owner of the image. What I ought to have done, if I really wanted to use the image that badly, is drop an email to the webmasters at ars technica asking them for permission.
So hang in there Suzanne. Some of us you have to beat with a two-by-four to get us to understand bandwidth economics, but we’ll eventually get there.
Livin’ on Tums, vitamin E and Rogaine
Y’all can debate this issue all day if you want to, have at it, have fun.
When it gets to usage on this board, that’s when it becomes an issue for us.
Patron, it’s nice that you would offer to cache the image in question for our Teeming Millions, but as you admit, you didn’t get permission to use it, so that still makes it not right for us to allow it on the site.
Nanobyte, you can argue the rightness of it as much as you wish, but if we followed your reasoning there would be no copyright or intellectual property laws at all. Cyberspace doesn’t always reflect real life and this is the new frontier in a lot of ways, but we are not exempt from respecting other people’s rights to their property.
There is also a moral imperative here and we choose to do the right thing. You may choose otherwise, but you can’t choose that here.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The Straight Dope
Let’s see: 7.4 K worth of a .gif file, times the number of registered users on this board … 7.4 x 4624 = 34176 K
Gee, that’s not much at all. No one would ever notice that drain – unless, of course, it’s repeated across the web since, as you so conveniently pointed out, the .gif was for use on message boards.
That adds up to several GB of transfer VERY fast.
What we ARE talking about is stealing bandwidth in regards to people on THIS site linking to images on other servers. It’s not a “non-issue,” it has nothing to do with porn, you deve, and it has a freakin WORLD TO DO WITH FUTURE POLICY ON THIS BOARD!
Why don’t you put your magazine down, stop browsing for porn, type with both hands, and go back and read TubaDiva’s replies to this thread – or, dare you also insist that SHE is digressing when she mentions setting a board-wide statement about “borrowing” bandwidth from other sites?
ONE instance was pointed out, that of the itty bitty smiley that some of you seem to obsess over. The problem – and yes, it’s a problem – is that it ISN’T just a matter of one file. That’s just the one that got noticed and used as an example.
What we ARE talking about is theft. Stealing bandwidth is still wrong, whether it’s a 7K image or a 300K image, and it can cost a site owner an outrageous amount of money. In addition, site administrators can be held responsible for what their users post (don’t make me look up the cites again – Melin? Your turn). The Chicago Reader might be pretty pissed if they had a bill for bandwidth usage sent to them for a site they didn’t even own.
If, via this whole careless attitude of “oh, it’s just a small file,” other users decide that it’s OKAY to steal (It’s not) and keep on posting images from other sites, it has the possibilty of coming down to a nasty mess.
A: It’s Wrong to steal bandwidth.
B: It’s still Wrong, whether 1, or 20 or 2000 people think it isn’t.
C: Insisting that a little image isn’t Wrong leads to quibbles on “where does it start being stealing and what can we get away with.” Sorry. It’s still Wrong.
D: We’re still talking about stealing.
E: It’s relevant to any – and I mean ANY – message board that allows the posting of pictures.
F: It will continue to be an issue, and relevant, so long as people continue to post.
G: Size doesn’t matter, whether it’s one itty bitty .gif or a hundred.
We are NOT policing. We ARE providing facts and truth to the reality of bandwidth theft, and allowing what should be intelligent and conscientious SDMB users to make the right and legal choice on their surfing. We can’t stop people, but we can make sure they know they’re stealing. The karma, should they choose to ignore, is their own problem.
I just haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.
Suzanne – hate to tell you, but I’m planning on stealing something from you . . . .
That sig line! I LOVE it!!! I am stashing it away for an appropriate moment. I’ll try to remember to give you credit for it, though! 
-Melin
Siamese attack puppet – California
Still neglecting and overprotecting my children
This much I understand, but please explain to me how I have any right to complain that people are accessing a site that I make publicly available for & encourage all the world to see.
Suppose I am a site owner/operator,
-
I write the code with special key words in the lookup line to make my site easy to find by search engines & web crawlers.
-
I have revenue-generating banners on my site, and I hope that many people will visit my site & click on them.
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When I agree to the host’s terms of service, I am acknowledging the possibility that I may be limited to X amount of traffic per month, and I further agree that any excess traffic is my responsibility and may be charged to me alone. Therefore, I have already agreed to pay for your access to my site, should it exceed my usage limitation.
So I understand & agree to these things, and then I am supposed to be irked that a lot of people are accessing my site & costing me money in over-usage fees?
(Exception: If I state on my site that you must obtain my permission to link to it, then it becomes an issue, but I don’t think this is what we are debating.)
My major point was echoed by Tuba:
and:
(emphasis mine)
With regard to:
This might be a valid point if everybody accessed the link at the same exact time. (“Okay everybody, now on the count of three let’s all click on this link…”) This argument reminds us of the question of what happens when all 1 billion+ Chinese jump off a chair at the same time, or what happens if everybody in Springfield flushes their toilets at the same time. Sure- possibly catastrophic, but since it’s never going to happen, it is just as much of a non-issue.
What is more, it has already been pointed out that:
So anybody who (or any message board that) has already cached the image in question is factored out of the bandwidth equation (for that particular image) from here on out. WAN hardware & software has become very clever in the last few years, and we have become very good at dealing with bottleneck issues.
Maybe I am too close to the problem, because I sit at a terminal all day long in a key metropolitan network operating center and try to configure network traffic patterns so that local web servers can get more hits, not fewer. Clients seem to want people to steal their bandwidth, because I get paid to figure out ways to get more people to visit their sites.
You’ll have to elaborate on this for me. If you’re talking about taking somebody’s privately owned images/files/what have you, then I agree with you, but nobody is going to frisk me and find stolen bandwidth in my pockets no matter where I’ve been on the net.
To draw an analogy: water (the data that can be “stolen”) flows through the pipes under the city’s streets, and may or may not belong to you. Bandwidth is the pipes themselves, and they can’t be “stolen” just because too many people opened their faucets. I can turn all my faucets on full blast, and possibly deprive my neighbor of water that she is trying to get, but I am stealing nothing by doing this (I’m just being a jerk of a neighbor) and at present there is no law preventing me from doing this, just as there is no law (that I know of) governing the use of a data medium (bandwidth).
My minor point was that this is going way beyond the scope of this particular forum, and has now gotten totally out of hand. When I said:
I was simply suggesting that we do this where more people are likely to get in on the debate; left in ATMB, we are essentially debating in a closet.
Quick, somebody switch on the ambulance siren so we can get some lawyers in here.
Don’t make me get Glenda on your ass.
Opus, I think the problem is that you aren’t understanding how it works.
Many servers charge a certain amount of money for bandwidth. It’s not a sudden drain, it’s a monthly accumulation, and metered.
Think, instead of water, electricity. Stay with me here.
Now, your next door neighbor hooks up his house to YOUR circuits. He slips and and plugs in spotlights into the outlets in your garage. He splices wires and runs the power for his hottub. He runs wires across to your porch light, uses an adaptor, and plugs in his stereo to the socket.
Then he sits back and uses your electricity, free of charge to him.
However … can you see where this is going? PLEASE tell me you can see this.
It’s costing YOU a fortune for electricity that YOU aren’t using. YOU are having to pay out tons of money that you could not reasonably anticipate having to spend, because someone else is using your system.
That’s what stealing bandwidth is all about.
It’s not a matter of everybody hitting at once. That’s server load, not bandwidth. It can crash your server, but the bandwidth load is the same, whether they all hit at once, or over the course of a month.
As to the first part of your argument, how is directly linking to an image on someone’s server, and, most importantly, without linking to that site and giving them traffic, a bonus to a site? Why the hell should anyone GO to that site in the first place when someone else is offering their images and they don’t have to click a button?
Traffic and hits on a site, as opposed to bandwidth, doesn’t just mean the drain on resources. It involves someone actually going to the site in question, instead of viewing a part of the site remotely. Stealing bandwidth also steals users, especially when no link is provided to the site in question. A site can’t sell anything, or make money on click-throughs, or get memberships if no one goes there, no matter how many people use their images. Again, they’re being cheated.
As to the whole cache thing …
Do you ever reboot? Did you check the “check for changes every time I visit this page” selection in your browser?
Every time I reboot and then revisit a site, despite the fact that I do have a healthy cache, I have to sit and wait for images to load. They don’t just automatically pop up because they’re stored in the cache. That’s part of why it’s a temporary cache. If my computer stored the full data on every single site I visited, I’d need several thousand gigs just to be able to surf.
To review:
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Bandwidth has nothing to do with everyone accessing at once. The numbers tick away like your standard meter. They add up, and don’t clear till the next cycle begins.
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People are not accessing your site when they directly link images – they are accessing your SERVER. Your site is never visited, you don’t make a dime on clickthroughs, and the visitor goes on without ever learning you exist.
-
The debate is highly important to this site. It’s entirely possible that people could lose their privilege to post ANY pictures at all if this becomes a more serious issue. The fact that so many do NOT understand the issue makes it even more relevant. It’s why I’m still trying to explain it. I’d rather not lose all the goodies on this site because someone had to push the envelope too many times.
I’m not exaggerating, either. Playing with HTML on this site is just as bad (though irrelevant to this conversation). Every time that TubaDiva has to shut down the board to fix the mess that some goober made just because he HAD to play with code, we come one step closer to losing the ability to use HTML at all.
The same goes for images. If people insist on linking in that manner, without understanding what’s wrong with it, the Reader could face liability for the usage. Since they really don’t want that to happen, don’t you think it would be much easier on them just to shut the ability to post images down entirely?
If that didn’t clear things up, I really don’t know what will at this point. People are going to think what they want to.
I just haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.
Let me try a different angle, complete with real-world examples.
Let’s break up websites in a few ways.
- Free vs Paid
Free servers, such as Geocities and Tripod and Xoom… the person who made the site isn’t paying, but the server is. Have you noticed that now if you link to an image on Xoom you get a XOOM logo instead? Tripod and Geocities and many others are instituting similar policies. Wanna know why? Because it is a BIG PROBLEM.
Analogy: My big gulp cup isn’t very big, and chucking it out my car window isn’t going to matter. True statement. Now go drive through some of the crappier neighborhoods in NYC.
Ok…moving on:
Paid sites. These are sites where the site owner is paying for their hosting.
There are several ways these are run, two common ways are to price by hits or by transfers. Yes, some people are charged BY THE NUMBER OF FILE TRANSFERS THEY SERVE. Your 3k gif is added the same as any other.
For the other, the smaller gif isn’t going to matter as much as a larger file, but it’s calling a hit to their server for every person who looks at every page where it is located.
Ok, so now let’s get into some real examples.
I used to buy server space on someone else’s machine (I have my own now). I paid $85/month for this, and it was supposedly “unlimited hits, unlimited transfers” woohoo!
4 months later they told me I was using too much bandwidth, and I had to start paying over $350/month for the level of bandwidth I was using. We’re not talking about amazon.com numbers here, people. We’re talking about OPAL’S FREAKING HOMEPAGE AND A FEW FRIENDS’ SITES. $350.00 US. My other option was to move my stuff to another server. Guess what I had to do?
Ok, I had warning. Let me tell you how it has sometimes gone. In the real world. To people I KNOW PERSONALLY.
A site uses more bandwidth than it was supposed to, and at the end of the month, a BILL for SEVERAL HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS (in one case that I know personally, it was over a THOUSAND) shows up. DUE. Not “in the future” but YOU ALREADY OWE THIS MONEY.
Do you see how you do not have the right to do this? Do you see the access logs of the site you are borrowing an image from? Doubtful. You may think “but it’s just one image” but how do you know that? How do you know how many other people are borrowing files from that site? And what kind of traffic the sites they are posted on get? Let me put a little perspective: If that “gunshot smiley” was posted on the front page of cnn.com the server it lives on would probably crash. Just from the calls for that one 3k file. Posted one time in one place.
Post the gunshot smiley in 25 threads, 4 times per thread, that is 100 calls for that file just from ONE PERSON viewing those 25 threads. Multiply that by the number of people likely to view the threads. Ok, so that is just the damage that YOU, ONE PERSON have done to that person. You don’t know if they are paying for it. You don’t know if other people are doing it too. YOU DO NOT KNOW.
Besides that, it is widely considered to be theft, to be rude, to be bad netiquette, etc. This isn’t just on a whim.
–
“it’s all real”
“I KNEW IT!!!”
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Hey, now we’re getting somewhere.
You’re talking about copying images from a site and using them for my own twisted purposes- I already said early in this thread that I agree about this potential problem.
I understand your electricity analogy as I taught it for twelve years, but I don’t think it’s valid in this case (and perhaps the pipes analogy wasn’t either). That analogy supposes a constant drain on my resources, what we were talking about here is a single instance request froma 3rd party server, and how that affects its BW.
I still take issue with the claim that any third party host is placed under any kind of load after the first instance of an image file transfer (and yes load increases with traffic, causing available bandwidth to decrease, so I still maintain that there is a direct relationship there). I asked about this somewhere else but I don’t think I ever got an answer, as it depends on the specific management of this particular message board.
My personal experiments have concluded that after the first request is made for an image that exists on a 3rd party server, no further requests are made as long as the Reader’s server keeps a copy of the file. Does it? Yes- an image that I posted several weeks ago can still be seen in the thread in spite of the fact that the original server from where the image was first referenced is no longer online. That’s the cache I was speaking of- the Reader’s, not end-user cache. (Not technically correct I know- it’s on a drive, not in cache. I chose the term cache because the mechanism is transparent to most people and it “feels” like our local cache.)
Because of this, the third party server gets no more file requests from any member of this message board. All 4663 members of this message board can go look at that image and the demand is on the Chicago Reader’s BW, not the original 3rd party server.
Any delay you’re experiencing while waiting for images to appear is a matter of available BW between you and your ISP, not between the Reader and the original 3rd party server from which it came many moons ago.
This is the part of your post I disagree with, and it seems to be the meat of your argument:
Yes, but only ONCE for everybody on this message board. Like I said, all 4663 members of this message board can go look at that JPEG even though the server on which it originally resided is long gone.
Wrong again for the exact same reason. A copy of the gunshot smiley would then reside on the CNN server (assuming all permissions had been properly granted) and no further burden would be placed on the original server.
In the intrests of coherency I am going to bed now.
Don’t make me get Glenda on your ass.