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49 Comments
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Wow. I can't believe it either. Just because you can do something doesn't make it right. This isn't a "***** the man" thing and I'm no big evil corporation. I'm a small time "starving" website with very real bandwidth bills. I dont need a bunch of leeches deep linking my stuff. Yes I block referrers but that isn't fool proof. The fact that I have to is sad. That I'm getting dugg down is even sadder. That some people seem to think they can do any damn thing they want because it is easy makes me sick. You people make me weep for humanity. Way to go champs.
- sdo1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I'm shocked at the responses I'm seeing here... "I can kinda see the reasoning for this", "Good news!. Little leech bastards who hotlink stuff...", "this is a great day for content publishers". Are you all kidding me? The content provider left their stream wide open. It would have been trivial for them to make it so users had to be coming through their own site. But they didn't and IMO, that means that it's OK to use. Same with linking pictures. Don't want your pictures served up on someone else's page? Then set up your server so they can't be. Easy.
I see this as very similar to open wi-fi points. If you don't want uninvited people jumping on, then lock down your wireless network. But if you leave them wide open then the expectation should be that it's acceptable to use the connection.
This is the way I'd like to see the law written... if you put something on the internet an don't provide the hooks to manage who gets to see it and how, then it should be perfectly acceptable to use that content. The copyright still exists. I can't copy it and then claim it's mine and serve it from my server. But if I ask YOUR server to give it to me and it does, then that's YOUR problem if you don't want that to happen. - vdubski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I work at a flagship station for an NFL team, and we have to turn off our audio stream during game time. We also have to turn over copies of the game audio to the NFL, immediately after the game. They even provided a digital recorder compact flash recorder with media to use.
So, yeah I could see how this would be deemed illegal. - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10@coryking:
If you host images/html files/mp3s/whatever on a public server, then don't complain if people access it from somewhere other than your website. Don't like it? Either tough ***** or implement an anti hotlinking system (pretty easy to do). - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The anti-hot-linking systems are not foolproof.
The most popular method is to check the http_referer to make sure the content was referenced from a previous page, but unscrupulous webmasters can bypass this protection, and worse, some anti-spyware software inhibits the http_referer from being sent so legitimate users can be stopped from seeing your web pages.
This is analagous to the spam problem. Some people say it's the ISPs responsibility to filter spam. NO it's NOT. Spammers steal bandwidth and resources. They are engaging in illegal activities and costing other legitimate sites money. Just because the cause-effect isn't super obvious does not mean there isn't theft going on. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5This sounds like a classic case of deep linking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking). Which within certain guidelines is legal. Again, its the lazy way out.. you put up content, then you don't want it linked to and you don't want to expend the effort to stop links to it? Take the stuff off line then.
Its a variant on the same BS of people suing google for indexing their sites while totally ignoring implementing robots.txt, or a mere request to google to stop. instead they send out lawyers. - acs12798, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yea great plan....and in the end we can have an internet with no images. Yes, I know that would never happen, but I really can't see being against this ruling. The stream costs them money to provide, and they should get to show their ads that go along with it. Some people here are so obsessed with "consumer rights" they think everything is an attack.
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6That ain't the point. This isn't about copyright. It is about theft of bandwidth. You want to steal my content? Copy it over to your own server and host it there. Dont double-diss me by not only stealing it, but making me foot the bill for all your website viewers too.
I thought "dont hotlink" was common netequite? I guess this kind of common courtesy is lost on the myspace/aol generation. Sad. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Good news!. Little leech bastards who hotlink stuff like this burn a bunch of bandwidth they never paid for. You might not pay-per-byte on your DSL, but real bandwidth consumers do. Anywhere from $.10/gig to $.50/gig. That stuff can add up, especially for streaming media.
Now if they could just sue the crap out of somebody on MySpace for hotlinking uncompressed bitmaps. Those little bastards used more than 10% of my monthly bandwidth until I blocked all myspace referrers.
You want to use somebodies media? Host it yourself! - embarkadero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5this is a great day for content publishers
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Sadly, I can kinda see the reasoning for this.
It'll take some laws to clear this up. And unfortunately, the way our Congress works, they'll end up draconian laws that favor the companies profits over consumer's rights. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Legal action is all well and good if you can afford it. It would cost more for me to sue supercrosslive.com than I'd get back.
Mr. Supercross is a serious jackass and the closer I read that arstechnica article (whose editors should also know better, especially since I'd imagine their bandwidth bills are HUGE) the less respect I have for them as well.
Folks. This stuff is a couple orders of magnitude higher than you are thinking. We aren't talking your blog here. We are talking *real* cash money. This guy is basing his business on stealing, and that isn't right. His business would fail if he had to pay for hosting the deep-linked content. Why? Because it is not cheap. Is it right to have somebody else play "charity"? - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6"These people are basically embedding the image/video/audio into their webcast."
So? You didn't host an all encapsulated website, you hosted (probably) some html files, some images, maybe some video etc. As per my comment below, if you don't like people using your publicly hosted data then implement anti-hotlink features.
For the record, I havn't ever hotlinked anything - khyberkitsune, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'll just mark this as inaccurate - here's why.
The title makes it sound like a very blanket statement. However, if I own the copyright to the content, and I say "Deeplink all you want, I've got the bandwidth." it just became legal because I explicitly stated that you have authorization to access my material, link to it in any way you can, and direct others to it. - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The "hooks" you mention do not work reliably.
So if content is "protected' those rights should be respected yes?
Well, a "copyright notice" on any web page is more than a reasonable answer to your question, and it's in wide use all across the web. Anything more elaborate shouldn't really be necessary because there is no system that has been proven foolproof to stop content theft. In the end, taking legal action will always be the best solution. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Hope Digg doesn't strip my HTML...
Here is deep linking:
..... somewhere in MistressRoninS.com's html .....
[img tag.... http://www.corykingswebsite.com/someimage.jpg ....]
....
See that? Every time somebody loads your website, their browser now makes a connection to coryking'swebsite.com to download someimage.jpg. That image could be 10kb, it could be 100kb. coryking'swebsite.com pays to deliver that image to MistressRoninS.com's browser. The viewer would never notice were that picture actually came from (unless they paid close attention to the status bar). If coryking'swebsite.com had advertising, that viewer would never see it. If coryking'swebsite.com wanted more people to sign up and participate on coryking'swebsite.com, MistressRoninS.com isn't helping. Basically MistressRoninS.com is a leech.
Now, if MistressRoninS.com physically copied someimage.jpg to MistressRoninS.com so the url is now:
[img tag.... http://www.MistressRoninS.com/someimage.jpg ....]
That is a whole different thing. That too, is stealing in the form of copyright violation. But at least it isn't also stealing bandwidth at the same time.
Had MistressRoninS.com provided a link like "here is a link to coryking'swebsite.com, take a look at the picture on his page and see the rest of his awesome site", the viewer would know that the content is from a different site. The viewer would get a chance to participate on coryking'swebsite.com and maybe click an ad or so (paying for the bandwidth). Everybody wins in this case. The content provider gets recognition and MistressRoninS.com gets a nice part of the pie too. - MistressRoninS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ MrLint. I appreciate the link, but now I am just confused about the ethics of deep linking as far as how it hurts the original site. Digg me down people if you want for me not knowing but I am genuinely trying to understand both sides of the argument. It seems that according to the WWW consortium, they are saying that forbidding deep linking, it threatens to undermine the web? as a whole?
h--p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking
From wiki on the search term "deep linking" :
"According to the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group, "any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole". "
I am one for looking up things and learning something I am ignorant to so I will be looking for more info to try to understand.. but before I can google any info I need to know -what term- to google for. I appreciate all the informative info in the digg commenting of this article too. I am trying to understand the difference between deep linking and direct linking the following examples :
. Embedding a you tube vid for example on my myspace.. is that deep or direct linking?
. Copying a photo from a web site, putting it in my photo bucket and linking myspace to my photo bucket, is that deep linking?
. Linking directly to a photo on some other web site so that on my myspace the photo's address is from the web site's address, instead of photo bucketing it.
Any info is appreciated..
MRS - Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I'd say the judge is stupid, but sporting events have those weird things surrounding them... If someone can't legally describe an NFL game, I can almost see how providing direct links to audio could be a problem (though, seriously, a whitelist, or the use of audio ads wouldn't be all that hard.)
- mentor972, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7So does this mean it's illegal for Digg to link to my podcast?
- netzdamon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2nice now youtube can sue digg! sweet!
- MistressRoninS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2 :) Thank you coryking for taking the time and patience to provide me with that informative example ! It makes much more sense now. I think its true, a lot of people have -no idea- what damage they are doing to sites by deep linking. I often see messages on myspaces like "Please do not link to my web site I can't afford the bandwidth.." and messages like, "We had to close the site because of linking to our photos..". I had no idea what they meant. Its obviously the intent of a site to have traffic on -their site- for their work and for the patronizing of businesses who pay for ad space on their site. Seems that I need to go over my myspace and make sure I am not doing that to anyone's site.
Thank you again. :) - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2We are entering the age were mom and dad are using the internet. Mom and dad need to understand this sort of thing in order to make informed decisions. In the back of my mind, I can just picture somebody like my partners 55 year old dad being a big fan of supercrosslive. They dont know about "deep linking", how browsers load pages, how bandwidth is provided, or any of that stuff. The comments on Davis's front page demonstrate that - all written by people like her dad. I bet he would be mighty pissed once I explained to him exactly what supercrosslive is all about.
And that is why I am so passionate about this. Hopefully her dad, your dad, and everybody elses dad is reading this.... People like Davis do great damage to original content providers, and dad doesn't know it. - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3coryking: You have to understand that the Internet is not what it was ten years ago. Whereas before hot-linking was as you put it "bad netiquette", today the Internet is seen (rightly or wrongly) as a free-for-all.
Its up to YOU to control YOUR content. Freely hosted data is accessible by all, until you choose to restrict it to just users of your website - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -8/+10Stealing is stealing. If you're taking someone else's content and bandwidth outside of their main site (which is probably displaying ads to subsidize their expenses) then this is theft. People don't want to hear it or think about it, but it isn't a nice nor legal thing to do. You can't just arbitrarily take someone else's content and put it up on your own site. Even if the content is freely available online, if the owner puts restrictions on the content, it's fair and right to respect those restrictions.
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Flickr, for example, lets you deep link in the form of those "badges" you see on the side of peoples websites. Youtube lets you deep link and embed their player on your website. You'll note that both sites clearly mark who is footing the bill for that content.
The example link in that article clearly shows this person barely mentions who is paying for that very real cost of content delivery:
http://www.supercrossonline.com/webcasts/Article.2006-12-06.5705
The fact that the media link on that page goes to an akami mirror shows just how much bandwidth clear channel uses. We aren't talking $25/month dreamhost folks. We are easily into the $20,000/month "datacenter" range.
Davis is a leech and a jackass to ask for donations. Does any of that go off to clear channel to pay for their costs? Why is Davis so afraid to link to the wrapper page? Is he afraid his website doesn't offer anything extra and people will just stop visiting him? - bluesdealer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Stealing is stealing. If you're taking someone else's content and bandwidth outside of their main site (which is probably displaying ads to subsidize their expenses) then this is theft. People don't want to hear it or think about it, but it isn't a nice nor legal thing to do. You can't just arbitrarily take someone else's content and put it up on your own site. Even if the content is freely available online, if the owner puts restrictions on the content, it's fair and right to respect those restrictions."
He didn't put it on his site. He linked to it. This now makes Google illegal. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Er... I made a booboo with that link. The example link above is the real content provider not the defendant, supercrosslive. There is no example of supercrosslive.com because the owner took all the pages down. My apologies to supercrossonline.com.
- Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, despite the general feeling of the rest of the community here, I think that the big, evil corporation in question had every right to sue this guy. He was ripping content and bandwidth away from the content creator so that he could gain revenue from ads and whatnot.
Sorry to burst your bubble here, anti-corporation anarchists, but there are times that a corporation is suing a person for a legitimate reason. This is a very obvious example - krisper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Is he afraid his website doesn't offer anything extra and people will just stop visiting him?"
Coryking, I think you've pretty much nailed the core of the issue right there. People who generate original content don't generally get upset about following reasonable ethics of bandwidth and respect for intellectual property. It's the people who have nothing to offer except links to other people's property that get the most riled up - unfortunately that accounts for a hefty chunk of the internet. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Tell your friends too. Watch how one of those infamous "heavy" myspace pages load. Notice how your status bar is loading those images from dozens of different domains. Who cares about me? Think of how many of those domain owners lack the technical skill to even *know* there are jerks on myspace stealing their content? Trust me on that, most good photographers are not technically apt and put their photos up on the internet not realizing how easy it is to hotlink. They get very upset (some near tears) when they learn some jerk on myspace was deep linking their images.
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Get a clue pal. These people are basically embedding the image/video/audio into their webcast. Thus the viewer of the page never sees my website. They see "random blog" with media that appears to be owned by "random blog". And I get to pay for it. Thanks! Just link to the *page* on my site that has the embedded media. That way a viewer knows where it is comming from
You want to steal content? Whatever. At least host it yourself though. Otherwise you are either clueless or a cheapskate. - coryking, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4This stuff is a matter of educating new users. Too many myspace people haven't the faintest clue what they are doing. They go to a "Sup3r 4wesome Myspace profile site!!!", copy-paste into their profile. They have NO IDEA that copy & paste contains images that are deep linked and they are stealing bandwidth. They dont even know what deep linking is (most people here dont seem to either...)
My brother has hundreds of car pictures on his website. Somehow one got deep-linked into a popular theme, damn thing was a 100kb jpeg! Used as a background in thousands of myspace profiles. That cost us mucho dineros! An apache rewrite rule later and it was a 2000x2000 2kb flashing gif...
That is what pisses me off. People deep linking who should know better. Shame of those theme sites and shame on myspace! We weren't the only ones. Almost every profile there deep linked every image. And the kicker is they had a ton of advertising so they were profiting off stealing peoples bandwidth.
There is no fool proof way to stop it either. You can only catch so many people with a referrer catch.... - qwertydvorak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@coryking: the reason you are getting dugg down is because on digg the deep link is king. just about every article has a post inside that says "direct link to the video"
- bluesdealer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Some people here are so obsessed with "consumer rights" they think everything is an attack."
And most people aren't concerned enough about them. - talkpoint, on 11/11/2009, -0/+0TalkPoint Webcasting is the solution to all of your communication needs. With hundreds of thousands of events delivered, we guarantee you won’t find more experience anywhere else.
http://www.talkpointcommunications.com/services.ht ... - floweringmind88, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3What a ***** court case. First off if you don't want your stuff linked, then get it the hell off the web. Second bandwidth is soo cheap right now it doesn't matter if stuff is getting linked (if you are having bandwidth problems switch to a different provider like dreamhost.com). This is the same thing newspapers were complaining about during the first bubble and look where it got them.
If he had been claiming this was his work and selling it, then I could see it, but basically this is someone suing to blame someone for their ***** marketing job and trying to collect money off of someone who is kind enough to market them for free. - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Don't host images on your *public* website if you don't want to have to foot a large bandwidth bill. Pretty simple really.
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4It is education and suing the crap out of people who should know better. Those myspace profile sites know better. The supercrosslive.com guy knows better. Both of those sites are quite literally profiting by stealing off other people. If they had to carry the burden of paying for hosting the content, their business model would fail.
Do you have any idea what real bandwidth costs? My piss ass site costs over $2000 a year in bandwidth. Sally-sue deep linking on her blogger site is one thing, but a real for-profit business whose business model includes "dont pay for bandwidth" is a whole different ballgame. I'm not a charity you know. - norris, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Putting old men that have no freakin' idea how the internet works in charge of internet law is like putting evangelicals in charge of science education... wait damn... double screwed.
- qwertydvorak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@coryking: if people were just downloading credit card numbers from the customer billing side of the site, and the company took no precautions to plug the hole, then where would your sympathies be ? the site took no precautions to close the hole even though it is pretty trivial to block access from other places. it is like a bank leaving an atm wide open to give out free money to anybody that comes along, and then complaining that people are taking free money.
- OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2If I could digg you up again, I would
- coryking, on 10/12/2007, -9/+7Um, there is no free lunch pal. Maybe your blog is a good fit for dreamhost but there is no way they can host real sites with real bandwidth use and with real servers in a real colo environment. Dreamhost simply not host a site that uses $200/month in bandwidth across a half rack of equipment (like my setup). Leeches that hotlink are a significant part of my bandwidth expense.
You want fuzzy kittens on your myspace profile? Pay for it yourself. You want an NFL webcast on your site? Fine! Host the stream on your own dime. Please don't add to my very real bandwidth expense. Besides, you might wake up one morning to find your NFT webcast replaced with horse porn. - kidcodea, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1hypertext based net? more like hypersue corporate crap.
shame really. - hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1DIdja hear about the new boom industry in Russia -- dot-coms!
Yea it seems that a lot of sites are migrating there these days.
Who'da thunk it? A boom in Russia media during a bust in the west.
The funny thing is that when Russia sleeps the US is awake.
But just watch out for PRAVDA. You have start each story with the assumption of disinformation. - sirloin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Ummm doesnt anyone know how to use htaccess?
This is more about the lack of programming skills of SFX than someone hot linking their streams.
With that said, if a site asks you not to link directly to their streams but to their page instead, you really out to do the right thing and link to where they would like you to. - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2You can't 'thieve' something that is given away for free
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+6That's fine it's ruled illegal and all.
..but we have to actually care about the law to follow it ;)
I know I don't! - OnymousHero, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2bury this comment like the little bitch it is
- mancat, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3Exactly. You put it on the internet. It's out there now. We don't care how we get to the stream, or how you want us to get to it.
Law? Who cares?
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