Hotlinking Fun
Am I becoming popular? Considering that I was a victim of design theft and forum hacking last month and bandwidth theft this month, I think I am gaining popularity (on a small scale). I noticed in my referral logs—aka: my best online friend—that someone was requesting one of my images many times from another URL. Apparently, Mr. Monahan is unaware of the finer points of online etiquette; I consider it my duty to teach him a lesson.
Long story short, I modified the image he was requesting (The Guns of August book cover) with an educational bit of advertising mockery. I’m not sure how long it will take before he notices, but I’ll be interested to see how long it will be until he makes a correction on his page. It is an interesting coincidence that I found this about the same time that I read a related post by Dan Cederholm. Luckily, I had a few more pixels to maneuver.
Dear Sir,
Lesson learned!
Next time, an e-mail might suffice as a more efficient method of teaching someone that “hotlinking” is improper. The world of technology is very foreign to many people in my profession, and they don’t teach courses on Internet Ethics to teachers. Two years ago, I thought making a website for my students would help get my students more involved in the learning process. I really had no idea of the ethical considerations until I read the article linked via your blog. I confess I have no idea what “bandwith” means, or how borrowing this image from you (since you do not own the copyright to the cover of this book) hurts your website, so I must plead naiveté to your charges of plagiarism. My moral reasoning suggested that in a non-profit environment, there would be no harm in using images (acquired from a Google search) on my website. I now know that this is harmful to the site that the image comes from, and can potentially violate copyright laws. Thanks for the lesson.
I think your maneuvering the image to read text was very clever indeed.
Best of luck in your online endeavors.
Yours truly,
TBM