Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

I’ve just had a comment here accusing me of bandwidth theft…which doesn’t make any sense, what do they mean? I used a couple of picture links on that discusson in a ‘my phones better than your phone’ spat with evilmattikins, but please, everyone, don’t follow any of the links on that page, you’ll just get me into more trouble….


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. incy

    I think they are stupid, unhelpul, etc. If they had a real problem there are much better ways of dealing with it for starters (like not posting anonymous lj comments, but being rather more polite, saying who they are and explainign htere issue properly).

    Technically they have a point that they are paying for bandwidth for their web site and presumably for a purpose and you linking to the picutre and none of the content is not what they are paying for. However in the real world it is likely to be so minimal as not to count. Then there is the whole question that since the whole idea of the web is linking (and after all http is hypertext protocol) then this behaviour is to be expected. indeed if the idea of the web is to encourage people to share information and to increase the sum of all knowledge this behaviour is to be encouraged (I will stop before I get back onto the original Xanadu project).

    Having said that I do have sympathy in certain situations (such things as passing off, outright copyright theft for monetary/commercial gain, or when it is done to a silly level). But a lj thread is really not going to generate millions of hits (not trying to put down the popularity of your lj here).

    Basically it all sounds a bit OTT and not really handled in a very ood way at all (even if it was the case that the person had ads on his page and paid for the site by them, surely it would have been better to ask for a link to the whole page and not just the jpeg). But if they do not want anyone to read it why put the thing on the web.

    I will stop ranting now.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Indeed, most of us live in the real world where there are worse things happening than deep linking from an individuals journal.

      Reply
  2. daevid

    P2P issue… where i’m from that mean Purchase to Payment… what does it mean @ your end???

    Copyright to me is only enforceable when somebody starts making a profit based on what i’ve done (without my say so)… otherwise chasing copyright infingers could cost a huge amount and be seen as time-wasting….

    Reply
  3. daevid

    Depends, Mp3 distribution for non-profit is fine… but those that take it for profit be damned (and sued) for copyright infringement ;)

    After all i like to have the hard copy in hand complete with case, cover etc… I’m sure there are a lot who would agree, and anyway surely a few sacrificial songs of good quality would draw a few potential punters to your other material… (obviously a trick a lot of labels are missing) ;P

    Reply
  5. neilh

    The way I see it there are three choices, a) link to the thing you want to show, b) take a copy of the thing you want to show, or c) not show it at all.

    (a) is what this discussion started off with, generally this is how I work things, if it is appropriate I’ll try to quote a relevant part of the thing I’m linking to to allow people to decide whether it is interesting or not….normally I link things in context rather than as individual pictures but that depends on the relevance of the context.
    (b) can be done in two ways, passing off the work of others as your own is plainly wrong, while merely hosting their work and crediting them (linking to the original site, etc) is slightly stickier ground, I think corporates would generally be upset by this kind of thing, while individuals less so.
    (c) reduces the richness of this medium to bland mediocrity, its called a ‘web’ because everything links to everything else where it is appropriate to do so.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Au contraire, that makes me significantly more popular than expected (or perhaps the discussion is more popular than expected)

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.