| Definition of direct linking or bandwidth theft, also known as hot linking | Posting or otherwise causing to appear an image which is hosted on web space which you are not authorized to use, draining bandwidth from that web space and costing its owner money every time your page containing the image is viewed. |
| You May Not |
You may NOT copy a picture (also known as "copy and paste" or
"cut and paste) from my site and paste it to your site. This
does not actually copy the picture but copies the URL from my
site which causes the picture to be downloaded from my server
every time someone looks at your site. You may NOT make a link from your site, discussion group or forum to my server that causes a picture to be downloaded from my site each time your page is accessed. This increases the bandwidth on my site and costs me money. |
| You May |
Download a picture from my site to your computer (right click &
'save as...) to upload to your server for use on your web site
or to a site which specializes in hosting pictures such as
Photobucket found at:
http://photobucket.com/ Establish a link to one of my
pages from your web site (Example: "For more weird recipes see Bert's site")You may link to a page on my site but you may NOT link to only the picture on that page. |
| To Sum Up | The ONLY way that you may use a picture from my site is to download it to your own hard drive and then use that downloaded picture to upload to your site, forum, picture hosting site or discussion group.In other words, you can link to a page but you CANNOT link to a picture. |
| You will be stealing bandwidth which is the number of bytes you
are downloading from my site every time someone goes to your site.
However, since you now know that it is wrong, I trust you not to do it again. |