Bandwidth stealing occurs when a website publisher serves content without hosting it. It is stealing because he/she is serving someone else's content without credits or acknowledgements. The blogging community is particularly guilty of bandwidth theft.
Bandwidth stealing typically happens with images. To illustrate my point, I am showing here a bandwidth-stolen image from Yahoo.
Harry Potter - Stolen Image, Stolen Bandwidth
One might argue that I didn't steal it at all; I have not copied it or modified the picture, in fact I am serving it right from Yahoo!'s website. But as you can see, it is indeed unfair to Yahoo and Reuters.
For further illustration, in the example shown below, I copied the image from Yahoo and uploaded it to my site, which most people agree is an offense. Right?
Harry Potter -- Stolen Image
Violation and Fair Use
IMO, bandwidth stealing is worse than simple copyright infringement because the content originator has been violated twice.
A more appropriate use of the said image would be as follows:
Picture Courtesy: Yahoo/Reuters
(served locally; with credits)
More Bandwidth Stealing Links
• Internet Tips
• FAQ on Bandwidth Stealing
• Tomorrow -- Preventing Bandwidth Stealing for Apache servers
• Topic of a future blog -- preventing Bandwidth Stealing for IIS servers
