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WHAT IS BANDWIDTH THEFT?
If you have come to this page from another website, that website is stealing our bandwidth!
Bandwidth theft is a growing problem on the web today. Many sites are having their bandwidth stolen from them without even knowing about it. Images, sound files, video clips, etc. are all being hot-linked by bandwidth thieves, costing website owners money & causing some websites to exceed their bandwidth allowance causing their sites to temporarily shut down for hours at a time.
Bandwidth theft is direct linking images, scripts, sound files, movies or zip files to your site from another site's server without the website owners knowledge or consent. This in turn uses that website's costly bandwidth without permission or compensation to the original site owner. This is considered to be bandwidth theft, also referred to as hot-linking or direct linking.
For Example:
Whenever you use someone elses URL address in your html codes to display an image on your site, without first saving the image to your own computer and then uploading to your own server space, you are stealing someone elses bandwidth. Some people may not even realize they are doing this, but the majority of those who are stealing bandwidth know exactly what they are doing! Anyone with any knowledge on how to create and maintain a website knows that this is wrong. There is no excuse for this type of behavior!
Unless you do have permission to direct link from a website....for example: using codes provided from a site for their topsite list, button/banner exchanges, etc....direct linking files from somebody elses website without permission is wrong!
Anytime a file is accessed from a server it is recorded on a log file. If someone links to an image on a site on somebody elses server it recognizes the website that the file was accessed from and records it. The law states that log files are considered to be legal evidence and can be used to support and prove theft in court.
Please help in the fight against bandwidth theft on the web & support this very important cause by sending an email to the owner of the site who is "stealing bandwidth."
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