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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."
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...
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?
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.
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.
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...
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
cute, but isn't this guy now stealing bandwidth from slaughterhouses?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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
of course, the poor webmaster whose server got slammed also did the right thing. the challenge of people "hotlinking" your content and "stealing" your bandwidth is best countered by technological measures -- not by rules, laws, or complaints. by employing the tools contained in a vast, featureful web server, he was able to stop fuddrucker's from using his content in a way he didn't approve, as well as solve a technological problem using the appropriate means -- not by making threats and demands.
on the internet, controlling the use of your content is simple. configure your software to transmit it only to those whom you'd like to have it.
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
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....
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?
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.
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."
I find making a HUGE single color gif image, like 1px tall and billions across, is just as effective, except it has the added benefits of hanging firefox on low memory machines, and being extremely low bandwidth (due to the way gifs are compressed).
Still IMing in the stone age?
Indeed. Very juvenile...
A polite email to the company webmonkey would likely have accomplished the same thing.
There's something to be said for taking the higher ground. Heck, I would've just let them link the game directly, but re-written the game to serve some ads too, and made some additional revenue from it, and probably gained some additional marketing for my software products.
If I was in the market for any software this guy was writing, he could consider himself blacklisted at this point...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
- 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
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.
So the guy just retaliated with out FIRST contacting Fuddruckers? That's the way to do it. You must be proud.
.
Stealing means taking someone else's property. And bandwidth *is* property. You hand over xxx dollars for yyy gigabytes of bandwidth. You trade one type of property (your money) for another type of property (your bandwidth).
So someone using your bandwidth is taking your property.
It's stealing.
electrictroy@yahoo.com
A polite email from the company webmonkey in the first place asking if they could use the content would have been preferable.
IF the "company webmonkey" even acknowledged his email how long do you think it would have taken them to change the site. In my experience corporate entities (I work in IT for a fairly large one) take quite a bit of time to do much of anything that doesn't affect their bottom line.
Perhaps you might want to take a look at his site. Something tells me he isn't really looking for marketing revenue. If you look closely you'll see he has no advertising on what appears to be a personal website.
His way, while possibly juvenile, was also a much quicker way of resolving the issue.
I'm sure he's falling all over himself in a panic that you're unwilling to hire him as a software guy, though.
Also, completely stupid. A couple of polite emails would have likely cleared the whole thing up. Does he suppose this burger company will want anything to do with him now?
Here is a fellow, in a moment of juveline petulance, destroyed a potential business opportunity (eg. "I'll write you an even better game for $$$"), to say nothing about damaging his reputation. The Internet is just full of people who react without thinking. . . He forgets the great rule of everything -- two stupids don't make a smart.
He didn't have to do anything more complicated than take content down and write a polite email.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
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!"
You are an idiot.
Likewise a simple phone call from the Fuddruckers web developer could have resulted in a win for both organizations. I've gotten permission for music, pictures, articles, movies all kinds of stuff just for asking. Most times it's worked out well for both of us and more than once I made contacts that were useful on future projects.
Personal communication, what a concept, huh?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The problem is, your bandwidth is available to the public. By posting it on the web you're effectively giving people permission to link to and access your stuff.
It's kind of like printing out your website and putting it in a box you leave downtown that says "FREE" on it. Do you have any right to complain about people taking multiple copies and telling their friends?
Likewise, this is Slashdot. Any complaint about linking to peoples' sites and using up bandwidth is pure hypocrisy as you're currently on a site that does nothing but that.
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.
So, by your theory, our very own Slashdot has performed such theft, what, tens of thousands of times. Hardly anybody ever invites the /. effect.
cat
Taking is not always stealing. If I ask Port 80, and Port 80 says "yes", then there's nothing stealing about it. Without that assumption, the Internet would be mostly useless.
As it stands, it's a matter of courtesy (of the linker) and technological controls (of the linked).
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I understand completely that Fuddrucker's should have asked the BurgerTime guy for his permission to link to his site, or at least given him a head's up that they intended to do so. It's a matter of common courtesy. BUT, the BurgerTime guy handled the situation like a tool.
Who wouldn't want the traffic to their blog/site/whatever? Bump your ad revenue! That's the missing ???? step to profit.
As has been noted, the Fudd's traffic was roughly 5% of his bandwidth, so spare us the "excessive bandwidth charges" sob story.
If you didn't want the traffic, just block it. Redirect it back to Fudd's. Whatever. Don't react like a 13 year old.
And finally: For me this is the best part. He ranted about being hotlinked without notice... this is EXACTLY what he did to the slaughterhouse folks, and even noted with apparent amusement that their sites were being "hammered" (his words). Don't bitch about netiquette and then hose the next guy in exactly the same manner.
Fuddrucker's did nothing fundamentally wrong. They lacked some social graces and failed the common coutesy test, but did nothing malicious, immoral or illegal. The BurgerTime guy trumped all of that.
Regards, John Hancock.
It would be one thing if Fudruckers was linking to his main site, either in the orriginal window, or in a new window. As I understand, they simply linked to the content on his webserver and displayed it embedded in their site or opened the game on its own. So his bandwith was consumed and he got no exposure for the rest of his site or any advertizing revenue he might have generated.
Slashdot, on the other hand, links to the website or article itself. The creaters of the site get all the recognition and exposure that they deserve, so there's no real loss on their part.
If Fudruckers had linked directly to a page on his site, providing all the exposure that he deserved, then his actions would be juvenile and crude. Removing his content and replacing it with a message stating that he couldn't afford the bandwidth would have been the more mature route to take in either case, but I can forgive his actions in this instance.
kmem russian roulette: Aquillar> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/kmem bs=1 count=1 seek=$RANDOM
on the internet, you DON'T control the use of your content, simple.
don't put it up without password authentication if you want some measure of "control".
fuddruckers and anyone else on the web have a right to link to whatever they want.
that's what the web is all about.
and talk about netequette.. the poor webmaster redirected the output to a virtual goatse picture or whatever.
they both messed up but the webmaster of the site in question is clearly unhappy that the hippie communists have the nerve and daring to link to his precious content.
if it's available to the public, you have every right to link to it. there is no STEALING involved here whatsoever. NETequette is a different matter.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source