What Is Bandwidth Stealing?
You created a website and all the elements associated with that site, such as graphics, HTML files, sounds, and so forth. Under the copyright laws of most countries in the world, they belong to you, the creator. They are your property and nobody is allowed to copy or use them without your permission. One day, while checking your server logs, you discover that the graphic you created as a link to a resource in your site has been accessed more times than the page it’s located on. “How can this be,” you wonder. “Shouldn’t it be loaded the same number of times as the page?” Later you’re looking through the list of referral sites in your server logs. Out of curiosity, you click on the link to a site that referred the page you were wondering about. There, in the middle of the page, is a copy of your graphic and it’s linked to your page. “Isn’t that wonderful,” you think, forgetting about the copyright issue for the moment. “He’s linking to my site.” Still curious, and perhaps a little bit pr