Attribution, Hotlinking and Courtesy
When I broke the story about the adsense URL hijacking, I posted the news, in a number of prominent forums in order to get the word out.This lead to getting additional stories on several prominent blogs, every one of them credited me as the source for the original story... with the exception of one - Mike's List (I am not linking to it).
Mike Elgan, proprietor of mikeslist.com has not only omitted the fact that I broke the story - he hotlinked *my* screen cap of the SERP.
The picture you see here is none other that Mr. Elgan himself - I hotlinked his pic. Mr. Elgan, according to elgan.com, is a professional journalist yet he omitted proper credit for the story.
Thanks for leeching my bandwidth Mike, and thanks for teaching me that even this little blog isn't safe from content stealing scumbags.
I have an mod rewrite .htaccess in place for future incidents.
4 Comments:
I couldn't find an e-mail link, so I thought I'd post a note here.
My lack of attribution was a mistake on my part. I had several of the pickups on your scoop open and simply forgot to plug in the attribution. Sorry about that. I've added it now.
The issue of "hijacking" pictures is an interesting one. What has become acceptable in the blogging community for some reason is the copying of pictures, rather than using them where they stand.
I suppose the ideal and perfectly correct thing would be for nobody to use anyone's pictures at all. No copying, no hijacking.
However, it seems to me that if you're linking to a page with a picture, using a link to that picture at its original location should not be considered "hijacking" -- or a violation of copyright. The courts have a mixed view on the copyright part of this.
It's really a kind of pre-loading. When the user clicks on the link, the linked site will come up faster because the picture is already cached. This actually improves the experience of the site one links to. And doing this means you're not "stealing" -- you're not making a copy for your own use. You're pointing to a picture someone published and -- assuming you attribute it -- it should be a fair thing to do.
I've have pictures I've created both "hijacked" and "stolen" both with and without attribution over the years.
The only one I find acceptable is to have them "hijacked" with attribution.
Thoughts?
Mike
Mike -
I appreciate the fact that you changed your blog.
Here's the deal. I notice that you've hotlinked images to places like CNN, sites with bandwidth budgets in the millions of dollars.
Hotlinking my image causes my bandwidth costs to increase with zero benefit to my site. According to my logs, as of 7 AM your pages loaded my image over 300 times. Had your site been more popular, or had it been left up, your site would have continued gnawing away at my bandwidth, costing me money.
I certainly would not have been happy if you had simply copied the image, and left out the "props". But the correct thing would have been to link to my site, so people could have seen the image, in *my context*, copied the image, with permission and proper attribution, or as you did, take your own screen capture of the SERP and credit the source of the story.
One issue is my omission of "props." Again, that was a mistake.
The larger issue is: What's a blogger to do? I mean, when someone knows their site isn't Slashdot, and gets just a few hundred or even a couple thousand visitors per day, and attributes and links to a site, it seems to me that the bandwidth consumed is at the level of a rounding error.
The extra bandwidth consumed happens only by people who don't visit the site one links to. Those who do visit the site are going to load the picture anyway, and if there's a direct link to the picture, it won't be loaded a second time.
So back to our example, my pages loaded your image 300 times. How many would have followed the link if I would have had it there as I should have? The difference between the two numbers is what would gnaw away at your bandwidth. If you do the math and calculate what you pay for bandwidth per megabyte and how many megabytes were consumed by people who didn't visit your site, it's going to be a single-digit number of pennies -- or less than a penny.
Publishing a blog is expensive -- not in money (for things like bandwidth), but in the time one spends. Using someone else's picture, you increase the interest factor and drive hits to the site that someone spent their precious time building.
Personally, I have a 30 gigabyte bandwidth limit for my web host, and I never get within 5 gigabytes. When people "steal" my bandwidth, it's not even a factor.
Anyway: Love your site.
Mike
I started a discussion over on WebmasterWorld about the issue of hotlinking versus copyright, some interesting ideas being brought up.
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