Art robbery
Embedding other people’s images or other media files in your web pages or forum postings is theft. Here’s why.
Let’s say the webmaster of Site A has a nice image on her site. The webmaster of Site B, casting around for eye candy to make his pages more attractive, sees the image and decides it would look good on Site B. Rather than asking Webmaster A or the original image copyright holder for permission to use the image, though, Webmaster B embeds the image into his page using Webmaster A’s server as his source.
Even if the image is subject to a free-use licence, using this kind of embedding means that every time the image is viewed, Webmaster A’s bandwidth is being used, not Webmaster B’s. This is theft, no matter how you look at it.
The same applies to forum postings; embedding a media file which is hosted on webspace that doesn’t belong to you is stealing bandwidth from the original host. Bandwidth costs money, and overuse can bring sites down.
Don’t embed files without permission.
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