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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...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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....
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?
... so surely it would have been much worse if Fuddruckers had copied the game and placed it on their site!? That would have been a possible breach of copyright, after all!
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. I mean, sheesh, what a loser this guy is - not only does he get upset that someone thought his work worthwhile enough to link to, but then he actually thinks his response was not only justified but also pretty damn clever. He writes - and you can see him smirking all the way - "But did I do this right away? No! I waited until the Friday evening before a three-day weekend. So either it'll be up for three days, or someone is going to have to go in during their vacation to fix it. My only hope is that an executive from Fuddruckers finds out about it before that happens. Because, really, stupidity like that deserves losing your job over."
So, yes, Fuddruckers should have sent the guy an email out of courtesy, but that's the only way that I can see that they did anything wrong. An acknowledgement on their website would also have been nice, but considering the game clearly states on the main page who it was written by that's hardly necessary. But these things didn't seem to upset the game's author anyway - what he seemed most pissed off about was that Fuddruckers had linked to his game, rather than copying it and hosting it on their site. Now, there's no obvious copyright on the games and nothing to suggest that they're open source or public domain
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.
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.