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Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking
naught writes "Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, hotlinked to a flash game developer's Burgertime clone on their 'Fuddrockers' page. When the developer noticed an abnormal amount of traffic coming from their website, he decided to let the company know how he felt -- and maybe teach them about hotlinking.." From the post: "So, I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com. (learned all about .htaccess files also... neat!) Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don't have popup blockers."
This is amazing, a major company such as Fuddruckers, with countless hits per day, linking like this to a site, without even notifying the site to verify if they have the bandwidth available, much less if the permission is there for them to use this site in the manner they are using it, to pretty much increase traffic to their site. Fuddrucker's site is currently off-line as we speak, so am assuming that they caught this effort to stop the hotlinking, and are currently redesigning their website, looking for someone else's nice work to steal while they are at it I presume. And to think, I almost went to Fuddruckers today to have a bite to eat with my fiance... here I am almost contributing to their ongoing misuse of net resources... shame on me... I better double check my site, to make sure that nobody out there hotlinks to it... don't want to see my bandwidth eaten up like this... At least my fiance's website, http://www.entertainmentwatch.com/ is set up so that you have to register to enjoy all the games... yet she actually has some pretty fun games. Battleships, Pacman, Tetris, and more... but she has them hosted on her server at least, so not using up precious bandwidth. Fuddruckers, take notice of this practice... such a hard concept... of downloading the game and HOSTING IT YOURSELF... versus stealing other's bandwidth... I wonder if in a court of law, that Fuddruckers could be sued to reclaim all that lost bandwidth that was used by this hotlinking campaign of theirs... Oh well, just my two cents on the matter :)
Need a Nerd?
Nerd Systems
Obviously this guy wasn't a Slashdotter, or he'd have linked to our favorite image... the Goatse Guy!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Owned. Nonetheless I'm glad to see that dolts are getting what they deserve.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Wait a minute... So someone is punishing another person for using a hotlink on the web? Someone has spent too much time sniffing the corporate glue of "we own everything!". The web is *about* linking, and open data structures, and access to information. How does information suddenly become inviolate if it's not splashed with corporate logos? If you don't want it to be seen by the world, don't publish it to the world...
I think Fuddruckers has already been slashdotted or they got wise to it and pulled the site. Kudos to the developer for claiming what is his. Too often in this day and age, it's too hard to do.
You see the look on my face, and yet you keep talking.
wasn't the POINT of the internet to be able to link anywhere at any time? /. has bashed sites before for there linking policies and legal action over "deeplinking", so whats the problem with this instance?
This is funny, I would have done the same thing. They cannot counter sue because they had no business.
If someone steals what I am saying, and puts it on their own site, then sues me when i change what I say, screw them!
Good for him!
Poo: fuddruckers.com is down. Oh, slashdot?
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: blithe
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
No Seriously... What will Gandhi Eat?
Sorry to say, but beat you by a minute :)
Need a Nerd?
Nerd Systems
Wow, glad I'm not the only person to use this technique against bandwidth thieves. Stupid neopets and livejournal users.
I redirected all the traffic from their site back to their own site. Neopets thought we were ripping off their site, when in fact I repointed the DNS of the site they were abusing back at them.
Those modder fuddruckers! Every modder fuddurcking time I see that modder fuddrucking restaurant, I start cussing like a modder fuddrucker.
No one is saying that Fuddruckers can't link to someone else's site.
BUT
When you do that, you're pointing people at someone else's content that they can choose to change at any time.
Sure, it's your "right" to link to someone else's page (or else the web wouldn't work), but make sure you don't piss them off or you never know what you'll be pointing to in the future.
Fuddruckers, take notice of this practice... such a hard concept... of downloading the game and HOSTING IT YOURSELF... versus stealing other's bandwidth...
Under some theories of netiquette, linking to an HTML page that references a Flash file is more polite than copying the Flash file to your own server because the former is normal use of the World Wide Web and the latter is copyright infringement. To put it into RIAA terms, "stealing" bandwidth is preferable to "stealing" a work of authorship.
I assume "hotlink" is just a synonym for "hyperlink." While I'm not complaining, why make up new terms?
I don't understand. From the screenshot of the fuddruckers site, it clearly gives the url and email of the flash game site... so how is this stealing content? Wouldn't a small-time flash developer want this sort of exposure? Doing some sort of goatse move to poor kids who are expecting to play a game is just wrong. This guy should be taken to court or soemthing for indecent exposure.
But then they're running IIS, according to netcraft so you'd expect they'd quickly succumb to slashdot. (Or maybe there's a nightly "closed for the night" that IIS does during backup or something silly like that?)
Note to flash guy: you're an ass and a publicity hound.
(1) Your game has a URL tag on it, so it's impossible for fuddrucker's to represent it as their own.
(2) Fuddrucker's accounted for only a small portion of total hits, and yet you're complaining about the bandwidth usage?
(3) Despite the evidence that the link was not particularly stressful nor malicious in any way, you went way out of your way to do something incredibly malicious back.
How... bad.
A) Corporate entity used someone's work without their permission, solely to gain traffic.
B) Corporate entity hotlinked said work so that the creator would have to foot the bandwidth bill
I don't think the creator would have mind much if he had his work used with permission and was hosted on Fuddrucker's servers. Hell, I would have taken it as an honor. This isn't a random teenager hotlinking some crazy photoshop on his Angelfire site, this is a major corporation stealing someone's work and bandwidth. Fuddruckers not only stole his work and claimed it as their own, but they stole his bandwidth at the same time. And they profited from their theft, while he was left with the bandwidth expenses.
Information should be free, but people's hard work and creativity should be rewarded. If someone is profiting off someone else's work, then the creater deserves compensation, unless he specifically allows it. I even ask permission from the site owner or creator before taking things and using them on my site. It's common curtesy. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's free to just take and profit from.
unable to resolve function slashdot.sig(), aborting...
(I suppose) it's not cool for a commercial entity to use someone's freely available document to enhance commercial value without obtaining permission or a contract or something or other.
uhmm, you know, sort of like slashdot articles where 4 lines of incoherent mischaracteration and a link bring down some hobbyist's case mod page, thereby allowing OSTG to make bazillions from banner ads.
How come slashdot doesn't get more slaughterhouse redirects?
I think I would have started by sending a rather large bill to Fudruckers...
on the fuddruckers webpage isn't a very good advert for their product... really... the kid is already obese...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well, Fuddruckers didn't get the chance to be pissed off about that, because they just got Slashdotted. Sucks to be them. I guess that's what you get when you bring down geek mob justice on yourself.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
those things are delicious! This guy is dumb though for thinking he came anywhere close to pwning them.
------
[insert funny
So, you're upset someone is using something you created without giving you credit or asking permission, but you copied the gameplay and name from another company's game without crediting them in any way or getting permission?
Apparently, his sense of moral outrage is not transitive.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
He has the URL of his website right there on the opening screen. So while they're stealing what looked to be 5% of his traffic, they're also directing people to his website. Wow, someone in corporate America assumed a little bit too much, what would have been wrong with a polite to the webmaster? And why not just change the URL? Instead he decides to expose people to graphic images because they made the mistake of going to the Fudrucker's website? Sheesh. Chill out.
MikeAtIF*ckStuffedAnimalsDotCom
From TFA:
EDIT: Apparently the slaughterhouse sites are getting hammered... they might take a while to load.
So, wait...he's bitching about hotlinks and then hotlinking to other webpages in order to show slaughterhouse images?
cute, but isn't this guy now stealing bandwidth from slaughterhouses?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Hot linking is firstly theft of bandwidth, because you deliver content to people coming to your site, whereas now you are delivering content to other peoples site.
Imagine a [real world] newspaper taking columns from another newspaper. Now, just because the technology makes it easy to do, doesn't make it right.
A 'page' is how it is represented or supposed to be represented in your browser (as some browsers could auto detect cross site linking and open up original sites etc).
Anyone could have LINKED to his site. like this but taking a bite of content here and there and framing it (in a popup) is wrong, unless you have a license to.
From what you are saying, I can have all flash games on my site, and even charge people to use it, because I am just hotlinking them.
'Jay is' website is good linking.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
maybe i'm behind the times or something but what the hell is a rudd fucker?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
From: Justin Daniels
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 19:056:32 -0400
To: webmaster
Subject: Complaint about your website
To Whom It May Concern;
Upon returning from a birthday party at one of your restaurants in Atlanta, my ten year old son wanted to look at the Fuddrucker's website. Normally, I am very restrictive on what Joshua may view, but I was confident that the content on your website would be child appropriate.
Much to my dismay, my son became very upset at something he saw on your site. When I went to investigate, I discovered numerous pop-up browser windows detailing how cows are killed and slaughtered, and ground into hamburger meat! This information was thrust upon him when he clicked on a link to a game called "BurgerTime" from your so-called "Fuddrockers" page, which appears to be intended for children.
My child is still upset, and it has taken my wife almost an hour to calm him down. Now he has said he will never eat a hamburger again, and has been repeatedly apologizing for helping "kill the cows".
I am absolutely appalled that you post this sort of information on your website. It is my duty, as a parent, to teach my children where meat comes from.
I can safely say that my family and I will never step foot in another Fuddrucker's restaurant after this traumatic evening.
Justin Daniels
Atlanta, Georgia
The fuddrucker effect?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
What would have been cooler is having all the Slaughterhouse websites retaliate against the Burgertime guy and call him names for using up their content/bandwidth.
Now that's a story =)
Now how the fuck am I going to play burgertime?
So what's the difference between what Fuddruckers did to him and what he did to the slaughterhouses?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Is anyone else just getting the google homepage when they go to www.fuddruckers.com ?
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Talk about "incredibly stupid" web developers, how about a guy who redirects unsuspecting consumers to his personal diatribe and some intrusive pop-ups?
FFS, complain to the company, move the file, restrict access from that referrer - but jesus, this is the kind of jackassery that makes people hate the Web.
Glog!
Let me get this straight. Homeboy complains about his bandwidth getting jacked, thus DoSing his web server. So we slashdot him? BRILLIANT.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Most of the comments seem to focus on the morality of what the Fuddruckers webmaster (of html-peon) did or on what Mr. Briggs did. I think I even saw a comment on how stupid Fuddruckers must be.
What I haven't seen is the suggestion that perhaps Mr. Briggs passed up a modestly lucrative opportunity to profit a bit from his originally selfless efforts. After all, it's obvious that someone at Fuddruckers liked his game. He might have been able to convince them to legally purchase the rights, or at least agree to indemnify him if the original creators of the BurgerTime game ever decided to sue Mr. Briggs based on copyright infringement. Perhaps he might have convinced them to purchase a tweaked version of the game, customized for Fuddruckkers.
Instead, he decided to make a rather malicious effort to embarrass them, poisoning any potential commercial relationship. But, the opportunity to rant and show off modest technological l33t skillz was apparently enough to offset the potential of acquiring base, material crap such as money.
People have gradually redefined the word, though, and now it no longer carries positive connotations. The current definition of "hotlink" is something like "to embed content in your web site which references an absolute URI on another web site." This practice used to be called image stealing or bandwidth stealing, but I guess those weren't buzzword-worthy enough.
I guess even with that definition, what Fuddrucker's did doesn't really qualify. What they're really guilty of is just plain asshattery, and it's possible that the "victim" is just perpetrating more of the same. His LiveJournal post includes this edit:
So, presumably, he's not hosting the slaughterhouse images himself, but he's redirecting Fuddrucker's traffic to innocent third parties... The very thing he's pissed off at Fuddrucker's for doing.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Well, apparently they didn't know how to fix it either, since, now, all requests are going straight to Google.
I've had a similar thing happen to me, although the company was not so big (it was just a single person). I think the idea that they wanted to link to him was pretty cool, because it also promotes his game, but he was right -- they should download it and host it on their site and give more linkback info to him so that people know they didn't create it themselves. It's always a funny sight to find simple vulnerabilities on the net.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
No need to gloat about it. Slashdot doesn't need another garcia.
YUO FAIL IT! would have sufficed.
the web is also about being able to change content on the fly. So I really don't see what is wrong with adjusting your content to the situation.
Now as to the whole bandwidth stealing thing:
If you put it on the web, they will come...one way or another.
If you don't want them to come, build in an authentication/sign-up scheme like one of the previous posters suggested. I don't see this as being worse from anything anyone does on the web.
Well said, Empiricist.
Perhaps he has suffered a gunshot wound to the feet, but at least his dignity is intact.
After all, _he_ pulled the trigger himself.
So is it just me, or is it a tad hypocritical to yell at them about "stealing" your work, when, from the perspective of the original Burgertime Creators, he "stole" from them?
We all know what hyperlinking is. Hotlinking is different.
Hotlinking is the practice of taking someone else's resources, typically images, sounds, flash files, etc, and displaying them inline in your own HTML page. This causes losses to the creator because they still have to pay for the bandwidth of serving the file, but reap no benefits. For example, the creator may have advertising around the page with the Flash game that never gets seen.
Hotlinking is generally seen as very bad form among web developers.
The Fuddrucker's site doesn't give the URL and email, that's only showing up in the game itself. Fudd's doesn't credit the author in any way on their own site.
Furthermore, as several have already noted, this type of link also constitutes bandwith theft.
Wouldn't a small-time flash developer want this sort of exposure?
No. I can say that with utmost confidence, being one myself.
Doing some sort of goatse move to poor kids who are expecting to play a game is just wrong. This guy should be taken to court or something for indecent exposure.
RTFA. He didn't put up anything obscene, he put up images from a slaughterhouse. And even if he had put up something obscene, the idea of taking him to court would be ridiculous. He's free to put whatever content he likes on his own site (provided the content itself is legal), and he's not obligated to preserve anything that someone else links to.
"To have the right to do something is not the same as being right to do it"
I agree Fuddruckers has the right to link to his site. I agree he has the right to change his content. I completely disagree that he was right to change his content in such a manner.
I mean, this company has just given him a compliment. "Hey", they said. "This game is cool". And how does the complimentee respond? By kicking virtual sand in their face because it generates too much interest. Something wrong with just putting a static 'Thanks for the interest, but we can't cope with the bandwidth right now' message up? Ie. being pleasant and polite?
And since the guy's getting so self-righteous, I assume he has permission from the copyright holders of Burgertime to clone their game and shove it up on the web for free in the first place, right? I mean, a person so certain of right and wrong must> have done that first, musn't he.
Cheers,
Ian
I don't know if they were really /.ed their site was down before the story went live.
Fuddruckers.com is not a high traffic site in any sense of the word "high" or "traffic". Do you or anyone you know frequent fuddruckers.com?
This is "The Internet". The idea is that you link from one page to another. While the whole thing is mildly amusing, this guy is a jackass.
A choice of masters is not freedom
After the few drinks I've had, I have no need for a story on Fudruckers.. now I gotta drag my butt to Whataburger. mmm... Buuuurrrgggeeerrrsss.
-Quixxilver- "Where am I going?
If you RTFA, you'll notice that fuddruckers was stealing this guys bandwidth, and making money off him. I'm sure he'd let them use the game if they hosted it (as it already has his email address and site name in it).
Fuddruckers should be taken to court or 'soemthing' for theft.
with users of myspace, etc. They're constantly hotlinking my gallery. I run my personal site off my cable connection, and I can always tell when they've done it, my cs:s pings go way the fuck up. I usually turn off apache while I play, then afterwards I swap the pic w/ goatse...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
FD linked to his game withut permission, which I agree was wrong. But It wasn't done with malice, and in fact it's a form of acknowledgement, albeit clumsy. If I were in his situation, I would just add some credits at the beginning, this way spreading my fame as a game (or otherwise) developer. In that sense, FD gave him a golden opportunity to increase his profile, and instead, he throws poo at them.
And more sadly, some people in this thread encourage such behaviour. To those, I say: grow up, stop thinking like spoiled brats. Seek out the opportunities life gives you, instead of being bitter, vengeful and malicious.
Sigged!
No one has mentioned this yet, but I wonder about the possible legal repercussions of this guys actions are? Before he linked to the new website, I would think he could ask for some form of reparation, but after this could Fuddruckers come back and sue him for liable? Does anyone have any more information?
Fuddruckers is now pointing at Google.
- Continue? (y)
SSL error:host(fuddruckers.com)!=cert(www.google.com)
These guys really are incompetent.
--
BMO
See, if only Slashdot had the forethought to write to the US Patent Office and patent 'Slashdotting' before, then we'd have had some real ammo to use against them. Go get 'em , fellas.
1. Create effortless Flash clone of popular 80s arcade game 2. Have corporate behemoth hotlink to said clone 3. Sacrifice your newfound traffic by bombarding your unsuspecting visitors with goatse pop-ups 4. Raise your arms and cackle in a bout of pure insanity as you force enraged users to uninstall their flash players and slash their wrists with razor blades 5. ??? 6. Profit!!!
-only 5% of the referers came off that hamburger site.
- there was a notice on the bottom, game created by blah blah.
- the web is about linking
But he has to redirect the users to some other site (He is direct linking too, but that's ok for him since he does it himself) instead of emailing the webmaster.
But it perfectly fits my view of the perfect stupid American.
He should have put up a paypal page to get people to pay $1 to play the game if they came from the Fud.
What an opportunity wasted for a developer.
He could have sold branded exhanced versions of the game to fudruckers to put on their own side, with burger discounts for folk who reach new high scores etc.
He sure missed the (3) ??? and therefore the (4) profit.
Shame! He shoulda read slashdot more often, then he would have known what to do.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
What about the obvious copyright infringement by the author? Maybe Burgertime's original copyright holder can sue the flash developer?
Seems like karma to me. It is like the guy who calls the police to report someone just stole his drugs...
The real problem is more of an ethical one than something legal. Of course, you can link. No problem. But it was stupid to do without making some kind of agreement with the game's author. I'm sure if they'd asked, he would have been happy to make a deal with them. Since they didn't, they learned a lesson about just including other people's content willy-nilly. Imagine the damage to their image had he used some really filthy image - that's a big risk to take.
.... " jpeg.
I regularly get people including my photos ( http://www.dedasys.com/photos/ ) inline without so much as a thanks or credit. If they ask, I almost always say "sure, go ahead!". I don't use nasty pictures, but do redirect the abusers to a "thanks for your interest in my pictures, they are online at
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
That's what I thought from the blurb too, but read the article and you'll see the difference.
They didn't just sent folks to his page. They setup a link to open the game, from his page, in a popup window, so that it would appear as if it were theirs. Check out the screenshots.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If you would take the time to read the article, you would notice that the games author had his website embeded inside the flash file (free advertising), and that it was not a large or even a particualrly stressful amount of bandwidth, but yet he chose to do something incredibly malicious back to them without even bothering to ask them to remove link. And the fact he take others content and does not give credit, but yet gets angry when the same is done to him is more than a little hypocrytical....
I could go for an ostrich burger right about now.
Free Hans!
The first rule of MSDN is do not post on slashdot about MSDN.
Quote = EDIT: Apparently the slaughterhouse sites are getting hammered... they might take a while to load.
Did he just redirect them to hot-linked images on someone else's site?
There's a Spelling Nazi in every bunch!
And I say +100 points to any
I'm sorry to say that the game that the Flash developer created is based upon a copyrighted arcade game (by Namco I think). He has not credited the owner of the copyright nor asked permission to make his own re-creation of their game. He even used the exact same name. If he wants to be so righteous about it he can first either get permission or remove the game from the web.
The same would go for a Tetris or Pacman 'clone. Sorry to say that many of the games that we all think of as generic were designed and programmed by someone and they own it.
As for his actions simply denying access and popping up a message saying that the content is unauthorised due to hot-linking policies asking Fuddruckers to contact him would have been a lot more productive. Was he within his rights to do what he did - yes. Was it a professional thing to do - no. As it stands he is either immature or looking for publicity.
To an european the whole concept off fuudfoking seems strange. And i cringe when i think about the pain associated with it. You must admit you americans are not the ordinary crowd when it comes to foking wink, wink, you know what i mean. Bu as i am an educated person i will pursue this matter utmost via google and perpahs self indulge me and my misses in fuudfoking.
Recently I upgraded my personal photo gallery to a new version of software, eliminating the need for a publicly accessible directory full of images. Well, since my site has been around for a few years, I've collected a goodly number of people at sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, and various other sites who have taken to linking some of my full res photos (2MB-5MB each) as the background for their sites.
Most of these sites are especially crappy, and as such, the bandwidth used wasn't much, so for the time being I didn't do anything about it.
Well, with the removal of the albums directory, I decided to redirect all requests for images in it to this annoyingly animated strobing GIF. This has the wonderful affect of making many, many crappy sites blink horribly. Like this and this.
I've eaten here .. It's a hamburger that costs more and you even have to put it together yourself. Instead of such a joke that could get them in legal trouble why not just sue?
... or, he could dropped McDonalds, BurgerKing, Whitecastle, whoever, a line ...
..."
"Listen - you want to place an ad bang in the middle of fuddruckers-dot-com? Let's talk
yes, we have no bananas
Two wrongs don't make a right. Fuddruckers was wrong in hotlinking, but I seriously doubt it was malicious. Their webmaster probably just wasn't aware of impact it could potentially have on the other website.
So instead renaming the file and sending a short email to Fuddruckers explaining their mistake, he attempts to damage their online reputation, PLUS take the bandwidth of some third-party slaughterhouse site? Not to mention, he intentionally did this before a long weekend, with the hope that it would stay like that for three days?
Grow up. That includes everybody on this thread who's "high-fiving" as well.
Why all the "theft" comments? How is FuddRockers any worse than music/video downloading? Hmmm.... food for thought.
I managed to visit his site - it was /.'d earlier. To my total lack of surprise the web developer who is the supposed victim in this is also passing off his own version of Pacman under the Pacman name - which also belongs to Namco.
How about he sends any money he gets from Fuddruckers to Namco eh? Not something I think that the slashdot crowd would like, but if you're going to defend someones rights then you need to defend all legal rights and he is currently infringing Namco's from what I can see. No I don't work for Namco and I can see he's not charging for the games. Trademarks aren't like novel, movie & song names - they are protected names under iternational law. As it stands if he created a game just like Pacman or just like Burgertime and gave them similar sounding names he'd be liable for 'passing off' at least.
In this world of open source clones of virtually everything I think I need to be very careful getting this point across to the slashdot crowd. Years ago I argued on this site (possibly under a different nic) that creating a clone of a commercial program as an open source implementation was wrong because it would devalue the hard work by the original creators who were only trying to make a living. At least invest some of your own originality into a project.
Guess I'm slowly turning into a troll... i'll go now.
What a sorry bunch of people all round.
What kind of "family" restaurant uses such an obvious spoonerism? The same kind of company that thinks it's cool to push "FCUK" right into the faces of my children in the high street.
I also think the guy had a valid complaint, but his reaction is that of an utter tit.
I hope they both disappear up each other's arses in a spectacular feat of Escher-like physics.
Gee, have the Slashdot editors lost their minds and good taste? Why is this article on the front page? Who tf cares what he did to hot linkers? This happens everyday. Gee.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Hooray for owning whoever operates that site and being dumb enough to do what he did.
This is like NO NIGGERS only cooler and funnier.
You couldn't email them to find out what was going on? You knew they were "stealing" your game, but you waited? So between the time you knew they were "stealing" and the time you got even, did you give them permission to use your game?
Yeah, that's right. They didn't even bother to download the game and host it themselves. They linked to my game, using my game and my bandwidth to promote their restaurant.
Let me get this right. They put a link on their website. They did not steal your code. They did not pass off the game as their own. I see at the bottom of the game, in BIG LETTERS your email of games@briggster.com. And I see the URL of your webiste.
Since when is putting up a link stealing. I can understand if they put an image on your website and hotlink it, that is theft. But since when is linking the same as stealing?
So, if I put a link on my website to The Onion, am I stealing from The Onion every time someone who visits my page then goes to visit theirs? Because I see you link to a ton of stuff from your blog. Did you get permission from each and every place before you linked to their website?
And how much traffic did Fudruckkers send your way? Looking at that pie graph, it looks like 2% or so. Who is that Saionji.net? They are "stealing" far more from you.
This guy should be arrested. He knew that Fuddruckers was linking. He did nothing about it. He waited until he could hurt Fuddruckers the most.
This is no different than if I see a neighbors kid walking on MY lawn. It is MY property. But I don't tell the kid to stop doing it. Instead I wait the day before the kids family has their summer vacation trip, with paid airline tickets. Then I dig a small hole, and cover it up with leaves. I put nails all over, and cover them up. I put stuff out for the kid to trip on and get cut up. HA! That will teach them, the family will loose their vacation and I'll have shown them.
This guy is a waste of a human life. In days with people suffering because of Katrina, this guy wants to cause a little more suffering. Instead of being proud that someone thought his game was good enough to link to, this guy decided to be a dick. He is no different than the looters who steal 40 pairs of shoes. He had an oppertunity to hurt someone, and he did it. He did not take even one effort to try and resolve his issue in a civilized way. Hell, Fuddruckers is a fairly large company, if he would have complained nicely, they might have paid him for any bandwith they used. Fuddruckers would not want the bad press. But now, Fuddruckers comes out as the victims, and this guy comes out as the dick. There is a moral to this story that kids should learn.
I am going to laugh when the follow-up story comes out on slashdot, about how Fuddruckers sues his ass.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Not only is he an asshole, he's a stupid asshole who deserves to starve. He COULD have taken the opportunity to write the company and attempt to work out a LICENSE for his work - since they were obviously making commercial use of his work, he could argue he was entitled to some hard cash compensation for it.
Gee, I wonder how open they would be to such an offer after this little prank?
What a maroon!
Has anyone tried to play his games? I attempted to play Burger Time and it was so choppy that I gave up. I figured it was due to everyone trying to play it, so I tried another game.
Breakout (while being a personal favorite of mine) was ok. But it played exactally the same as other flash versions I've played. Seems to me that Robb's been ripping some people off too. Cuz I could have sworn the people that originally wrote Pac-Man, Frogger, Break Out, and who designed the Rubix Cube weren't him.
IMHO, he's no better than Fuddruckers.
This has nothing to do with hotlinking. I find it utterly sickening and ridiculous that so many people obsess over the hotlinking while they don't understand the fact that Fuddruckers is profiting off of this guy's flash game. Kids are on the Fuddruckers website, they stay on there playing games, they ask their parents to go to Fuddruckers or the parents pass by, see the website as Fuddruckers, or the mere addiction of the game keeps Fuddruckers alive in the head, by synonymizing Fuddruckers with the addiction / gameplay of the game itself.
/. to read an annoying LJ thread about a bunch of idiots who worship a guy who replaces his flash game with a rather soft message and some popups? Wow, so friggin' important and slashdotworthy! He really took revenge on the big evil corporation and PWN'd Fuddruckers, "LOL"!!!
It is all marketing and business. Fuddruckers profits by creating a return value as well, as people would come back to play the game more.
Fuddruckers probably assumed that the developer would be thankful that a major corporation redirected a bunch of traffic to him - after all, that flash movie has his name and contact info on the bottom, so from a business perspective, and from branding, and getting one's name out there, there are several advantages to what's been done.
Everyone is obsessing over bandwidth but clue in - hosting is so ridiculously cheap nowadays that bandwidth hardly becomes an issue, and in all honesty who really goes to play that game on Fuddruckers so much, and is his website commercial? No.
Yes, Fuddruckers has stolen the game, and there are both pros and cons to what happened, but at the end, they didn't ask permission and they broke the law.
Does that mean it's worthy of being put on
Please people, get this off Slashdot and grow up. It says "Stuff that matters" at the logo at the top you know.
Yeah. We don't want Slashdot to turn into the local American news, now do we?
Oh, and I forgot my username and password here because I registered three or four years ago so whatever.
~ Feran
The issue isn't that he's getting traffic from Fuddruckers- it's that they're inlining his program on their website, taking his bandwidth for it, and never asked permission to do so. He said that he wouldn't have had a problem with them hosting it themselves, and I'm sure having them just add a link to his site along with the imbedded game would have been suitable too. However, the only way to know that the game wasn't Fuddruckers was only via the credits in the program itself- from the Fuddruckers page, it appeared to be a flash game that they developed.
/. or even just linking an article on wired, or redirecting traffic from your site to another(like he's doing with the slaughterhouses). With how Fuddruckers set it up, there was no credit, context, adds, whatever else included. Linked wired articles from /. still takes you to wired.com. What Fuddruckers did was more like copy the text of a wired article, eliminate all the adds and other content on the page, and still have wired foot the bandwidth costs. Additional traffic on a site is generally a good thing, but Fuddruckers wasn't sending people to his site- they were just playing some of the content he had hosted without them ever seeing his site, or crediting that it was his content in any way.
There's a difference between something like linking a page on
He's not ripping off the slaughterhouse sites in the same method- he would be if he just made a site with hotlinked pictures from those sites- making them foot the bandwidth costs and not giving them credit. Instead, users were actually redirected to the sites containing those pictures, along with all the other content on the site.
This being said, he probably went about handling the situation the wrong way. He likely could have made some money or at least got some free publicity via Fuddruckers had he played his cards right. As it is, he ruined any chance of that happening, possibly disturbed innocent bystanders(the people who might have followed that link from Fuddruckers), and in a worst-case scenario, possibly brought some unwanted attention in the area of possible copyright infringement for several of his games.
Now we are on the hotlinking subject, I have written a bot that reads 2000+ RSS files and follows up to 3 levels links to grap images. The images that are found are hotlinked showed on the page below.
http://herbert.groot.jebbink.nl/?app=rssImages
I think the result is fun, it shows the current topics in the world in images, and also a lot of personal photos. Is this ok? Or is it bad bad hotlinking?
-- http://herbert.groot.jebbink.nl
If someone steals what I am saying, and puts it on their own site, then sues me when i change what I say, screw them!
That is not what happened. It is more like if you have a website and post words on that website. I read your website, and put a link on my page to your page.
Fuddruckers can sue. They have damages. This guy went out of his way to cause as much harm to Fuddruckers as he could. This guy knew about the "theft" and he did nothing, he waited for a three day weekend to show how smart he was, how he out-smarted a big company. Boo-hoo.
There is a principle of law in the USA. Once you become aware that someone is damaging you, you have a right to tell them to stop. If you don't tell them to stop, tough crap on your part. It is no different than if there is a small river or creek on your property. It is near my property line too, but the water is on your property. One day you look out the window and see me with a pump, pumping water from the river on my garden. Instead of telling me to stop, you wait a few months, until I start getting fruit, then you put poison in the watter supply, to kill off everything.
You have an obligation to stop whatever harm is happening as soon as you discover the wrong doing. Otherwise you are consenting. You know the action the other person is doing, and yet you don't try to stop it, you don't ask them to stop.
A good example would be if the cable company found out you were stealing one of the premium channels. Instead of cutting off your service, the cable company lets you keep getting service, for 2 years. Then they slap you with a $500 bill for the channel. The cable company had a duty to say "no" the moment they discovered the theft.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
The game has his URL tagged on it in an incredibly obvious way. If he didn't want people direct-linking to the game, he could have easily denied all hits not referred from his own domain. But no - it was all fine until he saw a way to take a self-aggrandizing cheap shot.
that isn't childish.
Wow. He was worried about his BW usage, wait till he gets the bill after the slashdotting.
Well, I could stoop to his level and load up this cute little program that constantly reloads his page and graphics.... maybe that will learn him... NOT.
I cant believe I'm actually wasting my time on this ass. Oh well, slow night....
The Geek (not a script Geek)
If it had been my site being misused in that way, I would have put up a nice little extra-special flash animation made from angioscopy stills showing what happens when all the fat and shite in the chemical-laden crap in cheap shitty burgers builds up in your body.
I think maybe you are just a little hypersensitive to someone saying FUCK.
So this guy apparently thought that these massive 3 or 4 % hits were not acceptable, and learned about .htaccess to redirect them away? Wow, that is a really clever hack! And it seems he didn't even get it right, because his first referrer site now also displays the "dear Fuddruckers" message despite having nothing to do with Fuddruckers.
Also, he is replacing the original URL with shock images and popups? Dudes, there are troll groups on Slashdot who have been doing that for years...
Sorry, not really impressed. Nor even interested, to be honest.
God, root, what is difference ?
It just goes to show the Internet is a bit like hamburger meat - you can't tell what you're getting involved in. Where's the trust?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
doesn't slashdot kill websites daily?
Ass (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to get modded offtopic for this, but I've got karma to burn...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I remember playing these games when I was a kid looking for rootbeer and one more slice on huge wood tables!
Where's DigDug!?
While visiting the US at the end of last year, whatever you say about them, they definately make the best burgers (they even have a pound burger). Way better than Wendys, BK, McD, Hardys, any others that I have tried.
Of course, I had to leave the country, or I would have exploded.
- Simply restricted access to the game for all requests with a referrer of fuddruckers.com by configuring the web server.
- Contacted the webmaster and politely discuss options for hosting and credit. Who knows if he could have even made some money and publicity out of the deal.
- Redirected requests coming from fuddruckers.com to a page explaining why he thinks hotlinking is wrong.
Instead, he decides to show the world that he's an immature jerk, and in so doing reinforce public opinion of geeks as being primarily anti-social losers.First of all, learn the difference between hyperlinking and hotlinking. Hyperlinking means you link to another site from your own, which is what you were talking about. Hotlinking means you load something on your site that is located on someone else's site. The other site has to deal with the bandwidth use of both sites. That's THEFT.
Second, your analogy is about as relevent to the story as the price of bat shit in Trinidad.
Finally, Fuddruckers doesn't come out as a victim in any imaginable way and they don't have a legal case good enough to survive the first court hearing.
The flash file was his. It was located on his server. What he chooses to do with the files on his own server is his own business.
Only on
I would have linked it to goatse.cx - its the only way to really make a lasting impact.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Fuddruckers is hotlinking?! Why those f***ing F****uckers!
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
I did RTFA, and my only question is where is the
ESRB? Shouldn't they be getting involved for people (esp children) clicking on a link and being shown such things as slaughter house pictures.
I demand that this jack hole's burger game be given a M rating.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
Actually, Burgertime was made by Data East, not Namco.
how witty
Instead of doing something like this, he could have just made a page that has both the game on it and generates some ad revenue. He would have been more than able to pay for any extra bandwidth.
For anyone in a similar situation, remember to follow the simple 6 steps:
1. Is your content stolen are copyrighted by someone else itself? If so, tread carefully or use this as an excuse to say you were complying and removing copyrighted material from your site. Don't attempt to modify the content however
2. Is the hot-linker outside your country? This will add another layer of covering your ass, if not then be careful about what you put up
3. Is your website linked to your real identity? obviously if it is you want to bare that in mind, for your reputation and your legal protection.
4. Subtlety is good, if you can make it look like an accident then all the better, but if you want to put your own personal touch in so they know who they are dealing with. Shock tactics (goatse.cx) are great but remember that is likely to lead to legal action when one of their customers tries to sue them so be careful and follow step 5:
5. Use pop-ups if you want plausible deniability. Most people use IE and most IE users have pop-up infested machines anyway - you could always blame it on that and most non-technical people wont challenge it. BTW I said pop-ups, I didn't say how big they should be, take advantage.
6. Don't abuse the target pages copyrighted material, logos etc, don't use javascript to attack their page in any way outside of the given construct of the hot-link, that might be seen as breaking in somehow
I think the most effective thing would have been to replace the game with a single image of a burger being made with a turd.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
He didn't just send them to slaughterhouses. He also sent them /.! Fuddruckers.com redirects me to Google, and the Google cache isn't much help either.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
My (non-lawyer) understanding is that under current US case law, embedding someone else's content in your web page, even if it remains on their server, is considered a "performance" of their copyrighted work, which is indeed a violation of their copyright if you do it without their permission, as a copyright holder does have the right to limit where and how their work is performed.
So the guy just retaliated with out FIRST contacting Fuddruckers? That's the way to do it. You must be proud.
I do agree on the few bucks approach though.
Absolutely fascinating! I hope they did not point everything dere. host www.fuddruckers.com www.fuddruckers.com has address 66.102.7.99 whois -h whois.arin.net 66.102.7.99 OrgName: Google Inc. OrgID: GOGL Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway City: Mountain View StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94043 Country: US
Try this one... it is cleaner and less filling...
host www.fuddruckers.com
www.fuddruckers.com has address 66.102.7.99
whois -h whois.arin.net 66.102.7.99
OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
Mail I sent to a webmaster a couple of years ago (actually I sent it to the owner complaining about the webmaster, but they turned out to be the same person). They stood firm at the time but have fixed it since!
TheatrGROUP,
I found your web site while looking for information on Equity: the exact web search I did is relevant and reproduced below.
Did you know that if the following page on your site is viewed directly, by clicking through your site or entering the URL directly into the Address bar...
http://www.theatrgroup.com/showbiz/union/
then the correct background image is displayed, but if you view the same
page via the Google search engine, then the web server displays lesbian
pornography in its place?!!
The simplest way to reproduce the problem is to go into Internet Explorer Tools/Internet Options and clear your cache and history (because the problem won't happen if the correct images are already stored on your computer from a previous browsing session). Then do what I did and go to http://www.google.com/ and search for
equity "speaking part"
TheatrGROUP is the top hit right now, though that might change at any time. Click on the "Cached" link to visit Google's cached copy of your union page: any pictures on the page are not cached by Google like the text is (and that is causing the problem). If you look closely, this IS the text of your page, superimposed on rude images.
Some web sites creators object to their graphics being used by other web sites, particularly when the other web site just creates a reference to the original graphic rather than actually stealing it, as that inflicts the bandwidth costs on the original owner. This however allows the web site manager to get their revenge by detecting remote usage and providing a different image.
The two mistakes your web site provider looks to have made are.
1) Using adult images as the substitutes without regard for the target audience of the site that is "stealing" them.
2) Not realised that the Google search engine is not "stealing content" by indexing your site.
The net effect is that anyone VISITING your site is served with stuff about TheatrGROUP, but anyone SEARCHING for it gets hot girl on girl action!
Please acknowledge receipt of this mail: it contain some phrases that automated mail filtering software might reject!
Maybe he doesn't want to do business with a company that does inline linking.
I'm shocked at this fellow's behaviour. And my use of an extra "u" as in "f" and "u". Sent them all to the slaughterhouse!!
Because they'll see this story plastered here and at his JE and realize it's a troll -- if they can't figure it out just by reading it.
Yeah, and you needs to learn the difference between graylinking and fatlinking!
Seriously, who comes up with all these words? It's all links, it's not even markup or HTML because we're in flash land. It doesn't make any difference how you link it, it's all part of the web. But of course(!) someone else not allowed to claim the game is their own. But they didn't, did they?
In the normal world, in meatspace, if you're unhappy with what the other guy did because it causes you extra bandwidth costs or you didn't like their page colors or whatever you just phone the other guy, ok? Phone them and explain the situation and I'm sure they didn't mean any harm and can fix it or compensate you economically.
But nooo, on the Internet you have to be a dork. Now instead of having a mutually beneficial agreement (read: money) you hate each other's guts. Way to gooo!
do you think he invented BurgerTime?
However, the company were most definitely complete assholes and deserved what they got.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
The parent to this makes several claims & bashes the developer. Mod the parent down:
Most of his claims are unsubstantiated:
1)The developer got free advertising: This statement is true in a minimal way. Not like going to http://games.briggster.com/ though
2) An insignificant amount of bandwith used: This statement is unsubstantiated: There is no mention of actual bandwith use; just that Fuddruckers was creating ~10% of traffic.
3) The developer chose to do something malicious: True, but funny. Although the developer may be vegan - and thinking that Fuddruckers is incredibly malicious. (I doubt it)
4) The developer takes others content and does not give credit & is hypoticritical): This is malicious and unsubstantiated claim. It needs examples to be made, and it should get the author modded down. I went to http://games.briggster.com/ and there is no evidence that he has stolen any code. In fact it's a crappy page with some games on it.
I am suspecting that this is the webdeveloper who just got canned from Fuddruckers - although his boss told him to do it.
Now if you type www.fuddruckers.com you get google.
Independent of what happened, Data East or whoever owns the rights to Burgertime now has a corporation that has deep pockets it can sue for copyright infringement.
The flash developer may just find himself in the middle of a nasty fight. Plus, DE may be pissed that their good name Burgertime was disparaged by the slaughterhouse links.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Details:
ns2.inflow.net. (an authoritative nameserver for fuddruckers.com.) says that there are no MX records for www.fuddruckers.com.
The E-mail address in charge of the fuddruckers.com. zone is: dnsadmin@inflow.net.
Now can someone email that email address...I
a)need to sleep
b)not sure how to go about this?
c)wonder if it's necessary
So many replies use the phrase "stealing bandwidth" in this case, yet when they use their neighbor's wireless router, they call it "fair game."
This scenario might certainly help people question and shape their own ethics when they see the inconsistency... at least I hope so.
People have been goatse & tubgirlin' folks based on their referrers for years ;)
They have had their DNS hijacked. Netcraft's OS, webserver and hosting history page has the story... changed just today. (After the /. story hit??)
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
What a missed opportunity. All he needed to do was throw a few Google Ads onto his game page, and Fuddrucker's would basically be handing him cash!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Why is the author so pissed about the fuddrucker's bandwidth? I'm sure that the bandwidth that is being used by all of the /. hits greatly exceeds the few hits from fuddrucker's.
These are CARDINAL sins. DEADLY sins are a completely different family (bestiality, sodomy, incest, killing your brother/sister, assaulting your parents, possibly more I don't quite remember.) And yet there are sins against the comandments.
Sins against the 10 commandments come from Moses books. The cardinal 7 were added later. Deadly sins are supposedly non-redeemable, you go straight to hell for yiffing your mare, and no way to get around it.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
He'd have had the perfect claim if he'd linked to an image on his own server. Now he's worse, because he KNOWS how wrong that kind of linking is AND posts about how the slaughterhouse's pipe is getting hammered.
Sounds more like there's more going on here than just the linking of a game. Militant vegan or something?
If you have 1/2 a brain you find a way to benefit by fuddruckers linking to you. Put up a redirect to your page with google ads or something where you can profit. Instead what this asshat did was do something that will damage fuddrucker's business in a way that cost fuddruckers $1000's in free meals and create a publicity storm for them. Whatever the bandwith costs (and it won't be much given you can get a metric ton of bandwith for $100 anymore) it will pale in comparison to the damage done to Fuddruckers.
Reminds me of the sales guy that worked for me thought because we held up reimbursing $1,500 in expenses until we got his laptop and cell phone back he somehow had the right to piss on said cell phone and laptop, bag and box it and send it in. Instead of getting his $1,500 reimbursement, he got a bill for $2280 (value of laptop & cell phone minus his $1500).
Before you do something mallicious, understand that you don't have a right to retaliate, only a right to defend your self.
I still can't believe how stupid the guy was to make a stink out of getting free pr from someone.
-- $G
Either sell the game to Fudrucker's as a service or wrap it with ads...maybe Fudrucker's or (even better) Burger King's ads?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Is it just my ISP? When I try to load Fuddrucker's site I get Google's front page instead, including if I search Google for them & click the link.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
in his screenshot (the one of the Fuddrockers page)?
Check it out! Look's like Fuddruckers is now hotlinking all Google's content too!
/.ing]
[let history show that the above link is redirecting all traffic to www.google.com in an attempt to live through the
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
There are a few points of view being expressed here that I find to be utterly short-sighted.
1. That they aren't taking up that much of his bandwidth... Who cares? That's not the point. They are using his creative work to promote their product and giving him no credit. People normally get paid when a company uses their work this way.
2. That he is missing out on an opportunity to get more exposure or some sweet marketing deal from this... Bullshit. They have shown they are willing to steal his work. Why in the hell would he want to make a deal with someone like that???
3. That all those poor little children don't deserve to be accosted by these foul images of slaughterhouses... That's just too bad. There's a lot of things about the real world that are distressing. It's not this guy's job to protect them from it all.
What he did was an excellent way to get revenge on these bastards. He might not have a copyright claim (since they hotlinked instead of copying), but at least he can get some laughs at their expense.
Lets see, shashdotters, who's practice of linking to websites which then get absolutly flooded with traffic to the point that alot of servers go offline due to the traffic, is seriously defending this idiot?
Pot, meet Kettle. When Slashdot obtails permission before it links to any site, then you can act all high and mighty, until then your doing the exact same thing.
the original burger time game?? or is it in the public domain?
A lot of commenters seem to be missing the point. Bandwidth has very little to do with it - he did what he did because Fuddruckers used his game to promote their business without paying him for its use, or even asking him. I'm not necessarily saying I agree with what he did, but if you think he's mad about the bandwidth, you're missing the point.
Jim: "You know the problem with our site Bob?"
Bob: "What's that Jim?"
Jim: "Too many visitors. It's like they all want something we have and I don't got a dang clue why."
Bob: "So what're we gonna do? Sell them stuff?"
Jim: "Heck no! Let's investigate web technology and find a way to get rid of them. I mean if we start selling them stuff, they're just gonna be back. Before you know it we'll have customers all over us like bees on honey! No no, we've gotta nip this in the bud!"
seems like every image that drudge posts is hotlinked from yahoo or someone else
this is very very common
Mods, please get a sense of humor.
*dodges bad karma*
How can /.ers get upset over bandwidth "theft"? /. routinely blows peoples monthly bandwidth allocations and crushes whole web servers without even bothering to offer cache links. /.er's have as much right to be upset about this as MS does about abuse of monopoly.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Just Google here.
Either a retarded webadmin at Fuddruckers, or a more sinister hack. I'm suspecting the latter.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Note that it's a LiveJournal entry - Which is NOT his main website.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What I'm wondering though. Did a hacker get into their whois information and change the DNS servers, or did Fuddruckers themselves change the website records?
Actually fuddruckers.com points to a different location than www.fuddruckers.com. Its too bad domainsdb.net doesn't keep track of historical information.
... he might not even want to license it to anyone at all under a commercial license. And that choice is his to make...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I'm looking over these posts here, and good lord. Y'all are so naive. Haven't any of you ever lived in the Real World?
Ok, lets try looking at another case. A simple example, stretched just a bit to illuminate the obvious.
You're running Playboy.com. You have an extensive network infrastructure, multiple OC3 pipes, terabytes of data, round the clock support staff, unlimited rice pudding, etc etc.
I'm running NakedBoobies.com. My site has less than 10k of static HTML served by an obsolete version of Apache running on a 486 off my cable modem.
Most of my website consists of the lines: <img src="http://playboy.com/...
I'm making money hand over fist through my advertising links.
Now, do you want to call me and discuss this like civilized people?
Because I can guarantee you that, as long as I'm making a profit, I can drag this out pretty much indefinitely. "Gee, I'm sorry, the person you need to reach is traveling right now. Why don't I try and page him for you -- Is there number where we can call you back?"
Do you want to instigate legal action?
The courts are worse. With a cheap shyster I can drag that out for a damn long time.
And if I eventually lose, if you don't settle out-of-court just to get me to stop stalling, well does anyone here really want to see deep-linking become illegal?
Do you want to come to some sort of financial arrangement with me?
Ohhhh. There's gotta be a million ways to spike that. In the aforementioned Fuddruckers/briggster scenario, a quiet call to the right legal departments will get them involved, extending negotiations for years. Legal fees will take care of any profits that might have been had. (In the real world, legal departments aren't real concerned unless (1) rights would expire or (2) there's money changing hands.)
Face it: The technological solution is rude, crass, optimal, quick, and effective. When you are dealing with corporate weasels, this is how you make things happen.
A handful of people will see mildly offensive materials. That's the price you pay.
The redirection choice here was quite reasonable. The sites involved would appreciate traffic from Fuddruckers (or any other hamburger chain).
Porn, the frequent choice in these situations, would have been a poor choice given the potential for viewing by children, and the ridiculous children/porn position held by so many of the room temperature IQ crowd in the states.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.fuddr uckers.com
Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
on 216.183.122.74
Except the flash pops up in a separate window and has his URL and email all over it. That's not theft. We're not talking about someone who inserted a slew of image links to another page here. This is akin to direct-linking to an faq on gamefaqs. Is it poor form? Maybe. Is it theft? no.
And note the bandwidth was negligible.
Yeah, a courtesy note -- not a request -- from the company would have been appropriate. Hell, maybe they sent one. But feddhead over there posted his game to the internet. Surprise! It's getting hit. I'm no fan of corporate America, but nothing particularly unethical is happening here. Further, no real harm is being done. What a dick this dude is, hoping to scotch some webmaster's job by reacting with such venom.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
He might not even be interested in selling at all. To anyone. At any price. Especially not to Fuddruckers after having been this badly treated by them before. It IS his choice to make, you know.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
This guy probably gave up several thousand dollars and more publicity in exchange of ridiculing a company and praising it on his own personal webpage, all the while still not crediting the original creators of any of his games. To quote him, it was a bit "dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb" on his part.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Have you seen the juvenile obesity stats recently? Heard about the CDC study that by the end of the decade, 75% of Americans will be seriously overweight or obese? Seen the hypertension data?
Maybe the guy doesn't want to help sell fat-filled factory farmed burgers and salt laden genetically modified fries to children. Maybe he doesn't want to sell his software to fast food corporations at any price.
From the fact that he linked to photos of slaughterhouses, I'm guessing maybe he's a vegetarian. Maybe he has ethical issues with the consumption of factory farmed meat in the first place. In which case, taking the opportunity to prank the unethical seems like a reasonable response to me.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Why wouldn't he (or you) want exposure? Why else did he put the game up, offered it to the wild web, otherwise?
Sigged!
So someone using your bandwidth is taking your property.
Then why haven't the operators of news aggregators such as Slashdot been taken to court over their front-page links to sites? Is it a case of "it's not illegal if you don't get caught"?
Another clueless slash-dotter unclear on the concept of capitalism.
1. Write cool game
2. Put it on the web
3. ?????
4. Profit!!!!
Piss off evil corporations is not step 3.
Hyperlinking:
Domain.com
With a hyperlink, the owner of a site acknowledges Domain.com as the creator of content, and links to the site to show people its content.
Hotlinking:
With hotlinking, the visitor never knows that domain.com is the provider of the image used. Domain.com gets no exposure, has no opportunity to generate revenue, and has to foot a bill for bandwidth.
A few posters have mentioned that the game authors email and url were on the front of the game, but that is honestly irrelevant. Would Fudruckers have linked to him if he did not have the URL on his game? Also, if Fudruckers would have linked to an HTML page on his site, he would have had an opportunity to place banner ads on his page to generate some revenue. By displaying the game directly, only 1% of the visitors might actually click that link, which gives him less of an opportunity to generate revenue.
Nobody has the right to hotlink to content. Yes, there are ways to block hotlinking, but a webmaster should not be obligated to prevent people from doing so. If I leave my house unlocked, that does not give the public the right to walk in.
Clarification,
I'm not suggesting that slashdot caused a problem.
The event was described as "Company A linked to company B, Causing company B strife."
This is identical (enough) to a slashdot effect, Therefore, slashdotters have no right to (hypocritically) take offense to simular actions.
(although I'm sure someone out there will exercise thier right to argue the fine details of this.)
I didn't mean to suggest that slashdot was directly responsible.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Fuddruckers has taken their site down and configured their DNS servers to redirect fuddruckers.com traffic to google. According to the developer's LiveJournal, they voluntarily took the site down and apologized to him.
... use the correct term: transclusion.
>> "And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses."
;)
Wait... did he ask the slaughterhouse photo host if it's OK to steal *their* bandwidth?
I need a new avatar.
Fuddruckers.com points to google. In olde internet disney.com or yahoo.com were key exit points, and now google is the 'this page intentionally left blank'.
Presumably they think they were HACKED rather than them hotlinking a server which was sending them content pointing to new places.
What is funny - he hot linked the images himself...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
"He's free to put whatever content he likes on his own site (provided the content itself is legal), and he's not obligated to preserve anything that someone else links to."
.htaccess files) and redirected them to someone else's site(s).
He didn't change his site's content. He specifically fiddled with server stuff (notice where he says he learned about
The "I honestly just changed my website, it's not my fault they were linking to it" argument doesn't really work so well, now. Especially because he can't argue the moral high ground, having immediately turned around and redirected the traffic to unknowingly hammer some poor slaughterhouse websites (boy, that sounds weird...)
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Am I the only one who sees the incredible hypocrasy of slashdotters complaining about a high traffic site hotlinking to other sites and drastically increasing bandwidth use?
This is just amazingly rude on the part of the game developer. From the stats he posted it is clear that fuddruckers.com was responsible for maybe 4% of requests. For some reason, he thinks this is major problem, but instead of contacting fuddruckers.com and asking them to stop linking to his game, he makes it so that people visiting from fuddruckers.com are redirected to some other site, which isn't even up to that kind of bandwidth. This guy is far from a hero. I think he's clearly some kind of psychopath.
Check KELLY v. ARRIBA SOFT CORP.
The court ruled that framing was copyright infringement.
Fight Spammers!
Maybe they outsourced their IT to india.
- The Legal Definition of Theft - from The Legal Dictionary found at FreeDictionary.com
- Using that definition, when one owns a domain, and owns a website, that is tacit ownership (tacit is defined as: Implied (as by an act or by silence) rather than express (a tacit admission)).
- Hyperlinking has been previously defined in this forum, as versus hotlinking.
- Copyright theft (or any other kind of intellectual theft) is "stealing something where nothing is lost" - there is actual LOSS. There is income loss, there is loss of reputation, and other losses (and if you don't think that loss of reputation is an actual loss, go talk to a lawyer - they will talk your ear off on how REAL the loss is).
- Bandwidth theft is what is called a "tortious act" - Definition of TORT: n. from French for "wrong," a civil wrong or wrongful act, whether intentional or accidental, from which injury occurs to another. Torts include all negligence cases as well as intentional wrongs which result in harm. Therefore tort law is one of the major areas of law (along with contract, real property and criminal law) and results in more civil litigation than any other category. Some intentional torts may also be crimes, such as assault, battery, wrongful death, fraud, conversion (a euphemism for theft) and trespass on property and form the basis for a lawsuit for damages by the injured party. Defamation, including intentionally telling harmful untruths about another-either by print or broadcast (libel) or orally (slander)-is a tort and used to be a crime as well. DEFINITION OF TORTIOUS ACT: adj. referring to an act which is a tort (civil wrong).
- Illegal acts committed against private persons or corporations, sometimes do not fall into the sphere of criminal justice and are therefore required to fall into the sphere of civil justice. Such is the case with bandwidth theft, as well as copyright infringement.
This situation fits within these definitions and situations.theft n.
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale). In many states, if the value of the property taken is low (for example, less than $500) the crime is "petty theft," but it is "grand theft" for larger amounts, designated misdemeanor, or felony, respectively. Theft is synonymous with "larceny." Although robbery (taking by force), burglary (taken by entering unlawfully), and embezzlement (stealing from an employer) are all commonly thought of as theft, they are distinguished by the means and methods used, and are separately designated as those types of crimes in criminal charges and statutory punishments.This is the exact same definition found at Law.com
Without the right to link, there is no web. Whiny crybabies who put things on the Internet then blubbler when someone dares to connect to them need to get a life, post haste. If you've put it on the Internet, copyright or not, you have for all intents and purposes given your precious "content" away. The sooner we all realize that, the better.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
You are right that he doesn't have the original rights and therefor can't license it. He still has the rights for his implementation in Flash though, and it is clearly is a separate creative work based on the original game, making it a derivative work (he spent quite a lot of time implementing it, I suppose). Which basically only means Fuddruckers has to get permission from BOTH him and whoever has the rights from the firm that made it first (I suppose they've been sold since then).
Which really doesn't make it at all better on the side of Fuddruckers, rather worse, although it doesn't look really good for neither side (forgetting that the company that ought to protect its right to the game probably is more or less fubar).
Basically, just because he is infringing on someone's rights, it doesn't let anyone else in turn to infringe on his rights. Two wrongs never make one right...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I've had the same problem with my website. I'm honored that people would link to my content, but it's more fun to just replace the content with something else that might make the linker look silly or inappropriate. (evil grin)
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
if I link to that image?
The main problem with what FD did, AFAIK, was the fact that they linked to the flash directly, not to the website containing the flash.
(In comparison, Fuddruckers.com only accounts for a measly 4% or so, but that was apparently enought to make him go apeshit.)
Oh, and:
5. He hotlinked to the slaughterhouse images.
Looks like he thinks hotlinking is okay for everyone except Fuddruckers.
Free Hans!
I think you have to be careful where you throw that term. --'Psychopath' is a word with real application in this world, and mis-applying it to immature or thoughtless actions is dangerous. Some souls are struggling to grow while others are simply not there. Learn to discern!
-FL
Fuddrucker was stealing the Gaming Site's bandwidth, aka property, to promote Fuddrucker. Forcing the Gaming Site to PAY for Fuddrucker's self-promotion is stealing money.
How does anyone self promote by linking to another site? By linking to another website you are promoting that site. It might be self promotion if a reciprical link is asked for but the article didn't say whether this was done or not.
FalconShould there be a Law?
He didn't change his site's content. He specifically fiddled with server stuff (notice where he says he learned about .htaccess files) and redirected them to someone else's site(s). ...thereby changing the site's content, and making your argument self-defeating.
The "I honestly just changed my website, it's not my fault they were linking to it" argument doesn't really work so well, now.
yeah, it doesn't work because he never made it.
I understand what you're saying. I just think they intentionally pulled the plug, and it wasn't the traffic that killed it. But it's not like I have any facts to base this on.
.
What Fudds did was harmless and easily fixable at its worst.
What the "game maker" did was indecent and undignified. That page on the Fudd's site was apparently meant for kids to play "his" game from.
From his screenshots, imagine my (our) astonishment when the large red section of the pie graph was NOT Fuddruckers but rather the tiny sliver of ~5% orange.
The kid sabotaged a great business opportunity, plain and simple.
bandwidth theft?
i didn't know you graduated from the RIAA school of Accounting and Business
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Mods, please get a sense of humor.
I think you misspelled "Mods, please have an IQ over 30".
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Let me get this straight.
This game guy put content on his webserver.
The single, solitary, sole and ONLY point of putting something on a publically accessible webserver is so that people can access it. Because, ya know, that's the whole POINT of the internet.
People accessed it.
Now he's throwing a tantrum because his publically accessible content is being accessed by the public?
What the flying macaroni is this guy on?
He didn't put up anything obscene, he put up images from a slaughterhouse
Only in america is sex considered obscene and death and slaughter perfectly acceptable.
you show that hamburger stand who is boss!
who carea about a hurricaine? I'm safe in my basement.
Robb, nice one. Fuddruckers was inconsiderate in hotlinking to your content without asking you first. The web developer was irrisponsible in doing so because they put Fuddruckers at risk - associating themselves with content that was beyond their control. By definition, while these behaviors may be harmful, they're not malicious - there was no intent to harm anyone.
What you did was malcious. You've acted to cause a large amount of harm and seem to be proud of it. This kind of escalating retribution is lame. It would have been far better to have communicated with them and educated them that hotlinking is inconsiderate. You've passed up an opportunity for an amicable resolution. You knew that the game was popular at their website - they'd probably have paid you for it if you suggested it. Now Fuddrucker's has suffered damage, fewer people get to enjoy your game (those that would find out about it through their site) and you've burned bridges (prospective employers googling your name before they hire?). What was gained?
Fuddruckers was absolutely doing something impolite and should have been corrected, but I'm disappointed that so many people here are defending the actions of the content owner. Being malicious is never respectable. Grow up and get along.
Check out the site that links to his site far more than Fuddruckers. There's nothing on his site about copyright nor how he wants someone to link to the games. His URL is at the bottom of the game as is his contact information.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
If you're really that much more experienced you ought to be helping people. It's guaranteed that if you send the webmaster a comment mentioning how it's improper to do and how devious someone could be they would take it down. As for doing it on the weekend to make it worse I think that just furthers my point. I'm sure you've made a lot of first mistakes, is this how you were always treated?
Has anyone read the stories about the people in korea who get ganged up on by the online masses? What are you advocating by taking these actiosn and glorifying them by publicizing them?
View the source and you will see that most of links are back to fuddruckers.com. This page is merely a hacked copy of Google's home page. e.g. compare: href="http://news.fuddruckers.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab= wn" onClick="return qs
to
href="http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn" onClick="return qs
It seems a lot of people aren't understanding the difference between hotlinking and hyperlinking. Perhaps this example will help illustrate it a little more...
Games.msn.com has a huge selection of flash games. When you click on one it opens up a popup window with the game, along with a little line in the flash saying who created it. Did MSN create? Is it by Zone? Neither. The game i checked (Mah jong) was created by a place called Gamehouse. I've never noticed this before and I play it often. I access it through MSNs site, so why even check? But in this case MSN bought the rights to the game and put it up on their own website AND webspace. THIS IS WHAT RESPONSIBLE COMPANIES DO. If in the MSN case they popped up the game, serving it as their own, while it was hosted by someone elses site I expect the real creators would have taken down the flash game and sued MSN.
Could he have contacted them? Of course! This guy does flash games for the fun of it though, not for profit. Although i'm sure it was flattering for Fuddrockers to hotlink his game, if he hadn't been checking his logs he wouldn't ever have known. They SHOULD have done one of the following things:
1) Link to the guys homepage with directions to the game (click on this link, then that link).
2) Contact this guy and workout a plan -- where to host the flash file, $$$, maybe creating a new landing page specifically for Fuddruckers, creating an edit of the flash file specifically for them, etc...
One more thing -- people keep commenting that by popping up a number of other peoples site this guy is as bad as Fuddruckers. Calling him a hypocrite (to me) proves you're not thinking this through. He is not HOTLINKING these sites images, he's LINKING to their sites. This can be insensitive if you know your site is huge and you're linking to a site with small resources (like when Slashdot links to sites and they go down). The massive drain on the slaughterhouse sites IS the slashdot affect the long way around. Slashdot -> FuddRuckers -> this guy -> (slow slaughterhouse sites). I'm not saying Slashdot is doing anything wrong either, they're just linking it's what they do, but if you want to place the blame, put it in the right place -- where the traffic is comming from.
I thought we were still on "How dare those corporation's try to ban using links on the internet" and being ticked at people writing scripts to prevent hotlinking and deeplinking.
I don't mind the Hypocrisy, but will someone please make sure I'm on the list so I'm informed that we've completely changed the agenda, to prevent these little embarrassing commentaries from being posted?
Just so I'm still on the same page - we all still hate Microsoft and love Google no matter what they do right?
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Fuddrucker's was only sourcing 5% of his traffic. All while his biggest "hotlinker" accounted for over 50%. He says "Most of those links aren't a huge deal to me. I'm flattered that people like my game enough to link to them. But Fuddruckers??? Hmm. I decided to investigate."
Maybe it was a little excessive putting up pictures of slaughterhouses and an essay about "how incredibly stupid their web developer is"?
I mean, it's just SO stupid and rude to link to other people's web sites, and for profit! Anybody who does that clearly deserves punishment by having their audience redirected to offensive images and essays. Thank goodness slashdot isn't owned by a for-profit comany and that their webmasters are respectable and internet savvy unlike Fuddrucker's. They would never allow hotlinking to other sites without prior permission!.. Just imagine the "bandwidth theft"!
. . .
I don't understand why anybody is applauding this guy unless they have a personal beef with Fuddruckers (no pun! no pun!), he just made an ass of himself, and people are cheering him on!.. If other webmasters were like him, every link ever posted on slashdot would end up redirected to goatcx.
Nicely done.
Society in my country hasn't broken down because it wasn't there to begin with. Teenage pregnancy is low because everyone is fucking each other up the ass. I like to claim crime rate is low, but thats just because we legalized fucking everything, even murder. Hey, thats the third world for you. I like to claim children are more tolerant and better informed because they see bad things on TV, but really you just can't avoid it because my country is so fucking poor.
Not so poor as to leave 100,000 people to drown in sea water and liquid excrement (those that aren't running around with guns shooting cops, soldiers, and each other). You seen the news lately retard? America can't even look after its own. Who is "fucking poor"? Cuba managed to evacuate a million people before a hurricane hit. I think the people of New Orleans wish they did live in the 3rd world at the moment, they might have a had a fighting chance.
He didn't want to stop them using it, he was happy with them linking to his site.
His artistic spirit did feel that he should devolve his hamburger game back to the state of pre-additives, to the state of a posthumous cow.
Your last example is BS (politely), because that is just an invalid charge for the service, since you never went into agreement, and you are not supposed to know if it is a free channel or not, it is their responsibility to charge you the right ammounts.
So while you are right in saying they cannot slap you a $500 bill, you are wrong in stating they had a 'duty' to say '"no"' at the moment they discovered the 'theft'. [again, innocent until proven guilty, my cable install left all channels open, which I presume had nothing to do with the 3 cases of heineken (my flat mates) which happened to end up on the installers van]. In a case of theft, they could not charge you, but the real wrong is:
You are trying to argue a case of ownership of content and domain with an entirely different case, which while may be correct, doens't make a point on this case. We call that strawman tactics, trying to gain a victory in one area of discussion by stating an uncontended fact in another unrelated area of discussion.
This is how our current discussion looks to an alien:
A: "I think that Microsoft are making a bad move with their new ad center"
B: "But Muhammad Ali was a great boxer"
A: "..."
B: "ha... so I win!"
Although the general premise of 'after the fact' had some meaning, the changing of content owned by party A, has nothing to do with cable company billing, they are goverened by different laws.
Financial laws and sales laws, consumer laws and tax laws [and advertising laws] do not govern what party A can show on his website, yet do govern your irrelevant example.
I hope I have shown you that trying to make irrelevant unchallenged victories in a discussionon something else is a very stupid and child-like way of trying to show someone that they are '100% wrong'. I do not wish to discuss something with someone who cannot stay on topic, and uses straw man tactics, it is the most annoying thing, and I am sure other slashdotters agree!!
I love slashdot.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
No, it's still not theft. If I went to your house, plugged into your network, and used it, that would be theft. If I connect to your webserver and download the same file repeatedly, I would be a jerk, but I wouldn't be stealing.
You cannot steal something offered freely and publicly. If someone manages to slam your link and maxes out some hosting company's bandwidth cap on you, then that sucks. If you don't want someone to be able to do that, either use technological means to prevent it, or don't offer it publicly.
It's like if I put out a bowl of candy on a little table on the sidewalk. There are no signs that say "you may only take one", just a bowl of candy. Some people take none, some one, some a handful, and maybe you get some jerk that eats half the bowl. It happens and that's kind of a shame, but that jerk didn't *steal* the candy, he was just being a jerk.
Linking to a graphic on a webserver is the same thing as linking to a HTML file. If you don't want someone doing it, then don't offer it.
There are ads both because some people recognised a place to make a profit, and some people try to offset the cost of their publicly available services. Membership makes a site not public, so they don't really have a place an argument about public content.
Hotlinking is the same exact procedure as what you did to link the content on your site. Someone puts an embed, img, or whatever in some HTML, and the UA retrieves the content. The only difference between what *you* say is fine, and what *you* say is theft is the location of that HTML file.
So it's fine for you to link to the stuff, but not for me? Well shit, then you better not put it on the internet, or you better hope I'm nice enough to heed your invisible request to not link to your content. Most people out there won't link to your stuff if you ask nicely for them not to. That's still only "most", and you can't change the view of the other people. All you can do is try to prevent them from doing it.
Anyway, the point is that nobody can "steal" your bandwidth by downloading content that you made publically available. You're giving it away, for free, and people are using it, for free. That's the way this whole thing works.
In any system there are jerks that go and try to screw it up for everyone else; this is all that's happening. You can try to stop the jerks from doing it, or you can pack up and go home. But it still doesn't make it theft.
So this guy puts up a website on the World Wide Web and expects it to be a totally standalone structure, with nobody linking to it, because, y'know, it's not like the Web involves, y'know, like, links or anything.
... and someone who brags about making little kids cry is not someone I want to know.
And when he finds that not only has someone done this terrible thing and linked to him, but they're sending traffic to his website, and you know that's not what this Web thing is is all about, he decides that instead of contacting the company and telling them he really wants to keep his public website a secret, so please don't link to it, he's gonna try to upset that company's customers' children: the people who had the least to do with the decision to do such a terrible thing as linking to another website. And when he succeeds at that, he brags about making little kids cry.
And some of you people think this is a GOOD THING?
Leaving out the fact that this guy, to start with, was committing major copyright infringement, I've seen people here saying that Fuddrucker's should not have linked to his website, they should have stolen his content instead, and put it on their own server. Excuse me? Now that is wrong. You don't jack other people's content, you link to it. Links are the whole bloody point of the Web in the first place.
By their actions ye shall know them
I mean, yeah - I could see his point in a way, but they weren't using much of his bandwidth (certainly no where near as much as the other sites in that chart)...
He missed an opportunity - and perhaps put future opportunities in jeopardy. The bandwidth wasn't a big deal. He could have contacted the webmaster for Fuddrucker's, told him his concerns, let him know that he appreciated the flattery of the linking, but that he would like to come to a better arrangement. He is now, after all, thanks to that game and others, a Flash game programmer. He could have offerred to create a custom Fuddrucker's branded version of the game, to be hosted on Fuddrucker's site. He could have worked out an arrangement to license the game to Fuddrucker's, perhaps set up a "pay-per-play" agreement (ie, for each person who plays the game, Fuddrucker's could pay him five cents). It is basically advertisement in a subtle form. Fuddrucker's already pays this (and pays much more) for other advertising venues, his outlet would likely have been very cheap! He could then add this to his resume, he could have perhaps offered the game to be "branded for your enterprise" - or offerred the game to an advertisement agency as a service. He could now be enjoying fruits of his labor, for as long as Fuddrucker's were willing to pay. He might have been able to land a deal for his current employer as well (if he works for someone and doesn't do custom contract work game development).
Instead, he chose to throw all of this away - and unfortunately for him - to do so in a very "loud" manner. He may have (although in this day of 5 second sound bites, maybe not) even tarnished his own reputation as a game developer, and certainly as one for small games on web sites. If he is employed by another, the fact of that relation might even put his employer's reputation in jeopardy (and ultimately his own job). What could have turned out to be a lucrative thing for him and/or his employer has now likely become something that those in the business might remember him for - and he will find money lacking if he wants to sell games for corporate branded website use.
Let us all see his folly and learn something about thinking before we respond, lest our own pride causes our future downfall...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Sorry, I must have a reading disorder or something.
Hotlinking wastes alot of internet bandwidth. Pictures should change names every 2 days or so to avoid this problem. This could be written into current website creation software as a feature
"Who wouldn't want the traffic to their blog/site/whatever? Bump your ad revenue! That's the missing ???? step to profit"
.SWF file.
As a game site webmaster myself, I can say you are way off the mark. Fudd was linking directly to his Flash file. So even if the game author had advertising on his site, it would make no difference because Fudd was popping open a window with his game FLASH FILE displaying and nothing else. They were not linking to an HTML page, they were linking to a
So for every hit of traffic Fudd caused on this game file, the game author's bandwidth bill went up with no means to recoup that cost.
Also it can be argued that Fudd profits from displaying this guy's work since it is part of their marketing activities. If they can afford to pay some company to build them a website, I think they can afford to pay for use of a game.
The funniest thing of all is that the amount of bandwidth fuddruckers was taking up was 5% or less, judging by the graph on his site
No, the funniest thing is that because he complained about the un-payed-for traffic coming from the Fuddrucker's commercial site, he's now experiencing the un-payed-for traffic coming from the Slashdot commercial site.
perhaps the hamburger chain should have used Coral... but then again, wouldn't they rather upload the flash to their sites?
Oh well.
Everyone seems to be making the assumption that because its Fuddrucker's, its a giant corporation trying to screw the little guy. The truth is probably more like: fuddruckers isn't in the web business--their IT people probably aren't the most web savvy...and they linked to this guys stuff. I'm sure they learned a less on this one. On the other hand it could have been that "greedy corporation" trying to screw the little guy. But I doubt it. Savvy IT organizations would have gotten permission because they know the little guy can sue them pretty easily these days. Especially with some that leaves tracks..like traffic logs.