Qumana Blog :: Hotlinking QumanaLE

Main Page

Previous:	Press Release: Lektora Joins Qumana
Next:	The reviews are in QumanaLE rocks

Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Victor Aberdeen at 11:00AM (PDT) on June 16, 2005 | Permanent Link |

The new version of QumanaLE has an amazing feature that allows you to publish a photograph directly into your blog, literally you just drop the photo in, just so cool!

Now QumanaLE places a link on your blog to load the image from the site you dragged it from; this is called hotlinking -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlinking and causes some bandwidth issues. The alternative would be to copy the image into the post being created by QumanaLE and upload it to the blog server, technically simple, but potentially very painful!

So what is the difference and why painful? Simply, by hotlinking, the ownership and control of the image remains with the owner. To copy the image on to another server, is publishing the image with out permission and potentially in breach the image’s copyright. This could be considered fair use or permission may have been given, but we did not want to have our software put the people using the application in a potentially embarrassing or illegal position.

For the people reading your blog, there is no difference they get to see the post just the way you created it, text and images…

Posted to:

Comments

Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Anonymous on Tue 12 Jul 2005 10:27 PM PDT | Permanent Link

Ahem... This is not a feature, it's an invitation to trouble.

Even the very WikiPedia page you link to in this blog post discusses hotlinking under the header of "bandwidth theft". People get angry when you use their server to host pictures which you then present from your own website.

Some content owners even provide nasty surprises (using .htaccess tricks) where they set the server to only transmit the original picture when the request comes from an html file on their own domain. For other people's pages that "hotlink" their pictures the server will send a very unappetizing picture, often with a text like "I am a bandwidth thief" written in large, easy-to-read letters across the picture.

Cheers,
Jan Karlsbjerg
www.jankarlsbjerg.com/blog/

Re: Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Victor Aberdeen on Wed 13 Jul 2005 01:03 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The options to stop the use of the images are there for the more adept, most however wont even know, unless they look at their traffic.

I do however find the bandwidth theft a bit odd, if you put content on the net expect it to get viewed. It would be like calling Dell to buy a PC and they bill you for the 1-800 number phone call. It is simple to steal an image and abuse the copyright, as it is wrong to steal another person's work.

Thank you for your comments

Vic

Re: Re: Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Anonymous on Wed 13 Jul 2005 04:17 PM PDT | Permanent Link

Hi Victor.

No, hotlinking is not "like calling Dell...". In your analogy one business (Dell) would be charging a potential customer (you) for something that was promised to be free. That's nothing like the situation with "hotlinking".

A better analogy is if you set up a website (with your own design, your own opinions, and ad revenues going to you) and then for part of your content you use include-statements to make article text files from other people's websites appear on your site.

Right, you didn't copy the articles, but you are presenting them as a part of your content (with or without attribution - same as with the pictures) and you're letting the content provider pay for hosting the content. (And we all know that pictures require hundreds of times more storage space than text)

Jan Karlsbjerg
www.jankarlsbjerg.com/blog/

Re: Re: Re: Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Victor Aberdeen on Wed 13 Jul 2005 09:37 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Yes Jan,

I put the bandwidth down to a cost of doing business, like a 1-800 number.

Your right on the mark with the attribution, we have to credit the originator of the content; it is their words and images. People who just publish with out crediting the originator should have to pay for their abuse. Maybe we should set up a plagiarizers roll (LOL)...

And thank you again for the commentary...

Vic

PS.. images don't have to be huge files, almost all the photos on my site are under 300K

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Anonymous on Wed 13 Jul 2005 10:13 PM PDT | Permanent Link

...and I bet that 300KB is hundreds of times the text filesize any of your blog entries would be.

-Jan

LOL Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Victor Aberdeen on Wed 13 Jul 2005 10:31 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Sure is, even more than a thousand words :)

Vic

Re: Re: Hotlinking QumanaLE

by Tris Hussey on Wed 13 Jul 2005 08:40 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Jan,

There are two sides to this, but it really comes down to users knowing what is right and wrong. When sometimes hotlinking is okay (we allow it to track use of banner images) and when it isn't.

Post comment:

Format Type:
	Convert newlines
	Receive comment notifications for this article
Subject:

Comment:

Comment verification:

Please enter the text you see inside the graphic to post your comment:

You are not currently logged in. If you would like your user information to be displayed with your comment, please enter your login information below.