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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."
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
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: 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?
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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."
After further review, I've determined that three "wrongs" actually bring justice to this situation (very complex equations involved; not enough time to figure out how to print all those funny mathematical symbols in HTML). Anyway, here's my solution:
# while true ; do
> wget http://games.briggster.com/media/burgertime.swf
> rm burgertime.swf
> done
*yawn* Goodnight.
- 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.
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
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.