On one of the recent episodes of TWiT someone made the comment that hotlinking is rude, but not illegal. Sure, you’re sucking up the other person’s bandwidth, but you haven’t copied the work so the copyright hasn’t been infringed. Looking around the net, there is a general consensus that hotlinking is bandwidth theft, that this is the worst thing a person can do, and there are a good many pages attempting to dissuade potential hotlinkers from performing this most vile act.
It then comes with some confusion that we find this site has had one of its images hotlinked. That’s right, a few days ago while checking stats, the site groudscore.net started climbing through the ranks of referring URLs. Figuring it was a text link, I followed the URL, created an account to view the forums, and in the midst of a conversation about favorite condiments, someone linked to the condiment page of Wikipedia, the one where I placed my link to the CM index. I guessed someone had passed the link to my site on for the rest of the forum to check out. Instead, I found a picture of my CM drawing with “Condiment Man:” labeling it.
Confusion filled me, should I be happy that my work is moving around the web, or should I be upset someone is running off with some bandwidth. It didn’t take long to decide, as having the picture floating around is going to be better than not at all. Also, I added some text to the bottom, so those who view it can find their way home.
In looking at the stats today, I found that myspace was also leading quite a few people here. My assumption had been that people were coming to loeffert.net from the link on my profile. Turns out, the same guy who put CM up on groundscore.net stuck the same picture as a comment on his friend’s myspace. Oddly, it seems he posted first on myspace, then on the condiment forum.
So what’s the point? To all of you potential hotlinkers waiting to link away at this humble site’s pictures, for now, go right ahead. The novelty of it has me pretty accepting of your practice. Soon, hopefully, there will be many more pictures of the other CM characters for your hotlinking ways with bios and storyography.
here here.
the only difficulties i would have are:
1) initial detection
2) changing the .jpg that is being hotlinked, and creating a second .jpg that doesn’t have the site reference and editing the code on my pages that refer to that image.
it likely wouldn’t be a big deal, but if someone used my ‘backHome.jpg’ i’d have quite a few pages to edit.
but for the most part, no problems are likely.
also, i did check ‘cow’ in Wiki, and it appears my link had been removed.
i remembered having done it, placing it right below ‘holy cow.’
i suppose it is fair fodder for removal, in that Cow Defender is far less cow related than Condiment Man is condiment related.
sully’s and my own goDaddy sites appear to be down, whereas yours does not.
this was the case three hours ago, it is true to this hour.
I agree with the difficulties associated with hotlinking. Detection can be a problem, especially if the page it was placed on doesn’t drag in much traffic. In this occasion though, any bandwidth usage is minimal, and any traffic to be gained by going in and changing the image is likely small, but I would bet the percentage of those seeing and checking out the site would be high, depending on the context.
Modifying the image was the biggest hassle, as it did mean modifying page code and the image. For the most part, I don’t have too many repeating images on my site at the moment, but that will likely change as the site grows and more pictures are added.
it looks like i have a thing to attend at 9am on Saturday morn
i’ll give you a ring as soon as it is over (which is noon i think)
what a crazy weekend