Hotlinking to big sites is legit - they don't care a bit.

Tom over at themediadrop has been scratching his head about hotlinking lately. Why is it that sites such as the heavily trafficated Drudge report gets away with both bandwidth theft (in the form of hotlinking) and copyright infringement when little known blogs would get kicked off their webhosts for less? In his post "Hotlinking: It's obviously legit, right? (wrong.)" he shares some comments he received when he asked about the practice at the newspapers that Drudge was hotlinking to. A Times spokesperson got back to the Media Drop with the reply: "We took a look but Mr. Drudge had no photos up in the manner you had described in your e-mail." revealing their pale grasp of how the web works, not viewing the source or right-clicking an image to see it's "properties".
The images Drudge showed from the Times were hosted at the Times website, infringing the photographers copyright (and/or the papers) and piggy-backing on their bandwidth in one go. That is, unless Drudge had permission to do so, which none of the papers asked said that he had.

Previously Tom Tomorrow slammed Drudge for nicking images off his site here, which we all know is a no-no, don't we?

It doesn't end there though, the site ArtYears.com seems to be stealing all of their content from other sites! What an original business idea! Saves a great deal of time when one doesn't have to create any content or fuss with scans, even the site design looks like a screenshot from the Panther release of OSX.
Films are from AdAge, with the watermark intact and articles like this one about caring for freelancers are copy-pasted straight from CreativePro, and despite having this blatant disregard of their own copyright notice pointed out to them, CreativePro doesn't seem to care one bit. Don't we feel like schmucks for doing the right thing[tm] and simply linking to their articles. Adage seems to care less as well, no C&D's have been sent to ArtYears yet.
Is this the green light for everyone out there to simply steal all watermarked films from the big sites and re-host them elsewhere? Couple it with some google-text ads and you might even make cold hard cash on other peoples content. What a deal!

It's a sad day when the infamous quote from the News Editor of The Daily Star "You can't copyright anything on the internet." begins to ring true only because the old media big guns couldn't care less - or simply don't understand - that they can and should protect their rights to their own bandwidth and their own content. AP photographs grace tens of thousands of blogs in hotlinked form and the photographers never see their paycheck for it - all the while AP pays for the bandwidth spent.

Dictionary: Hotlinking - the practice of embedding a file (jpg, mov, mp3) into your webpage that is actually hosted on someone elses page - thus using up the bandwidth from the other page to serve said file, leaving them to foot the bill. The long word for regular text-links that take you to another web page were called hyperlinks last time we checked.

See also Hotlink in the Wikipedia.

Related reading: Top Ten Myths about Copyright and the excellent notes on Fair Use.

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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
James Trickery's picture

About that art years site - Did trhey steal their legal mumbo-jumbo disclaimer as well?

The entire contents of the Site are protected by copyright and trademark laws. The owner of the copyrights and trademarks are www.artyears.com, its affiliates or other third party licensors. YOU MAY NOT MODIFY, COPY, REPRODUCE, REPUBLISH, UPLOAD, POST, TRANSMIT, OR DISTRIBUTE, IN ANY MANNER, THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE, INCLUDING TEXT, GRAPHICS, CODE AND/OR SOFTWARE.

. so did they make deals with CreativePro and Adage to use their content then? I doubt it.

blabla's picture

This is fun - has CreativePro not responded? So many articles are from there.
Like this one; Marketing IQ at ArtYears, and at CreativePro.

Another one, Passion matters (at Artyears) sems to come from How Design, or perhaps from MasterFile. Are these free for all articles or published to many websites by design?

The "Psycho-Analysis of a Corporate Name" article appeared on CorporateLogo before or at the same time as artyears published it. Was the author Naseem Javed, sending the article out to get some publicity for his book "Naming for Power: Creating Successful Names for the Business World" (New York: Linkbridge 2000)? I'm thinking perhaps these articles are "free for all" of some sort, like pressreleases that are collected at big PR-hub sites.
I've emailed the sites mentioned, when or IF they get back to me I'll let you know what they said.

As far as Drudge and his bad habits goes - a friend works for one of the papers he has hotlinked images from (as a photographer), and no there was no agreed upon permission that he could do so from the start. You'll only hear that from the trenches and not get a straight answer from anyone higher up that has the power to speak out. I have no idea why.

Nannew's picture

WHy didn't people investigate this further?

Dabitch's picture

Not sure why this post from '04 was just splattered with spam comments. That's so weird when that happens. Reading it though, times do change don't they?

Anonymous Adgrunt's picture

Yes, times change. Times change a lot. These days everyone wants to post every image and video on every website, because if it is all at one host, it can be deleted from the web forever. Hundreds of people will upload the same film to Vimeo, Youtube, Reddit or wheatver.