What is Bandwidth? What is Bandwidth Theft?
Lots of people are starting websites, blogs and journals these days. And they may post an image or two or three only to have someone come along and accuse them of bandwidth theft. This article answers the question: What is bandwidth and how can you steal it? And why is it so very wrong?
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is a kind of a budget you have on your hosting account every month. Say, for instance, that your service lets you have 5G file space and 10G/month bandwidth. That means you can store up to 5 gigabytes of permanent files - any kind of files - and transfer up to 10 gigabytes of data - any kind of data- per month. Once you've stored 5GB of things on your diskspace, if you want to add more, you either have to delete something to make room for it, or upgrade your account to get more diskspace.
Every time someone accesses a page on your website, your server transfers the page to their browser and this costs you bandwidth. Most HTML files are tiny, 10K or smaller. So you would have to get 100 hits on a 10K page to eat up one megabyte of your monthly bandwidth, and 10,000 hits to use a gigabyte. This is why most people never even know they have a limit - they just never get close to using it.
Photos take up more space, 100K isn't unusual and some as much as a megabyte. Then every time people view your image, there goes a megabyte out of your monthly transfer budget. If you have an html page that displays twenty images, every time that page is displayed, so are those twenty images, with their resultant bandwidth costs.
Displaying Images
When you want an image to appear in your webpage (or blog-page, same thing), you use the image source tag, like so:
[img src=" http://www.companyname.com/imagena me.jpg "] where [ and ] are taking the place of < and >, and the URL is the actual URL of the image.
And here's the deal - you can make any image, from anywhere on the internet, appear in your page if you know its URL. Here's where I think a lot of people get confused. They use the URL of the image as they found it, and figure that because they didn't copy and save the image, but left it were it was, they're not 'stealing' it. But they're wrong for two reasons:
- They're using it to decorate their own article, and using it in ways the owner of the image didn't intend, and probably doesn't know about, and
- They're using the bandwidth of the image host's server.
But what does it mean, using bandwidth?
When someone clicks on a page on your website, your server sends to their browser all the stuff like text and displays it. But if you have a 'hot-linked' image, their browser goes and gets the image from there instead of from your server, so you are causing their resources to be used to serve your purposes.
This is the moral equivalent of running an extension cord to your neighbor's outside outlet and running your refrigerator and air conditioner off of it, and it's actually the same type of crime. It's literally theft, and it's called 'theft of services'.
It's actually not quite the same, since most people never use their bandwidth budget for the month - most people never come close. But it's like minutes on your cellphone - just because I don't use all mine this month doesn't mean you can just take them.
When people's accounts run out of bandwidth for the month, their websites stop being displayed. This can be a big big deal, and they have to either negotiate a larger budget with their service provider, pay some hugely inflated rate for any over-limit bandwidth they use, or just stay off the air until the first of the next month. So it's not exactly a victimless crime.
A humorous tale of image (and article) poaching
A woman I know had a nice article on her website about making paper lanterns, carefully and completely illustrated with pictures she took of each step of the process. She uses copyscape (a program that searches for duplicate content online - a great way to catch plagiarists) and found someone had copied her article, word for word, on their website. They didn't even credit it to her, but said they wrote it. Worse, they hot-linked her images.
She sent them email asking them to take it down, but they ignored her. Everyone else was telling her to contact the web-hosting company, but I said, no wait!
Change the names of the images in the article. Edit and reupload your article so it points to the new-name images. And make new images using the old names and upload them, over-writing the ones this person is pointing to.
So she followed my plan, and soon, when people clicked on the stolen article, here's what they saw.
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First some text about getting starting, which references, say, Figure 1. Figure 1 is an image that now says "the person who owns this website is a thief and a plagiarist."
- More text, then 'see figure 2' which now say "They not only stole my article, they're stealing my bandwidth to display these images."
- Yet more text and then 'see figure 3', which now says "if you want to read the article by the original author, with the original images, go to ... " and her URL.
Yes, this way she still has to lose the bandwidth it took to display those images, but she was nowhere near over budget and it felt good.
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