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."

Comments

Steal the bandwidth, or steal the work?

[tepples]

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 wonder how the slaughterhouse people feel =)

[starvingartist12]

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 =)