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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 04:23 pm

(I swear the music was not front-loaded.  The true irony of this musical serendipity didn't become apparent until I previewed my first draft.)

Sailor Jim Johnston linked to this Snopes article about USMC Gunnery Sgt Michael Burghardt, nicknamed "Iron Mike" by his buddies.  Read the story, and you'll understand why they call him that.  I read it, and figured more people needed to see the photo (and to read the story, several months old though it may be).

Snopes.com, however, which got the photo from the Omaha World-Herald, doesn't want anyone else getting it from Snopes in turn -- accredited or otherwise.  So they put a monkeywrencher on it that replaces it, if YOU try to link it in turn from THEM, with a rude face, almost ... gee, almost like it was their copyrighted photo in the first place, and not something they copied from the Omaha World-Herald.

So, yeah, here's the Stars & Stripes article on Iron Mike.  And here's a NON-monkeywrenched copy of the photo.  To Gunny Michael "Iron Mike" Burghardt, a hearty "Semper Fi."  And to Snopes.com ... well, Iron Mike says it all, really.

Hey, Snopes guys?  Iron Mike looks a lot better with his ass hanging out in the breeze than you do.

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Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 05:33 pm (UTC)
Um, Alaric? I'm afraid you're dead wrong on this one, lad. And if you think about it calmly, you'll understand why. It has nothing to do with copyright; it has to do with bandwidth. It's considered bad netiquette to just link to elements on someone else's website instead of linking to the website itself.

If all the page elements are hosted on your server, then when someone looks at your page, you are the one paying for the bandwidth. If, however, you link to elements on someone else's server, suddenly you're using their bandwidth to serve your customers.

Consider if I decided to create a gallery including several pictures from Seatoria 2000. I could do it one of three ways.

1. I could contact you and work out a deal where I either mirrored your galleries, paying for my bandwidth for people who looked at them, or I could provide thumbnails on my site with direct links to Babcom.com. The second would impact your bandwidth, but do it by redirecting visitors to your site, which you might want for advertising or other reasons.

2. I could simply steal the pics off babcom.com and save them on my server, then set up the web pages that way. You'd find out about it after the pics had spread far and wide across the web, and you'd go after me for stealing your work. That's copyright.

3. I could link directly to the images on Babcom.com from the page I created, then, oh, post a link to my page on Slashdot. Suddenly, your bandwidth is hosed, and you haven't the slightest idea why until you can check your logs. Even if all I did was link a few pics from my LJ, you would still eat the cost of providing the data, without any recompense.

How do you stop it? Simple. You set your server to check who is asking for the data. If it's a page from your site, go ahead. If it's someone else, you can ignore them, or redirect them to as polite or impolite a "No" answer as you like. It's your bandwidth, why should you do the work for them?

It's Snope's bandwidth, why should they do your work for you?

PS - Congrats on the news about the nerve block ;)
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 06:09 pm (UTC)
See the discussion above.