Bandwidth theft

Aug 30, 2002- Permalink

Blackplanet.com is a community site that allows members to create personal homepages. They’re such good corporate citizens that every single one of their homepages has a link on it allowing you to report abuse. Abuses like copyright violations, harassment, etc. Every personal homepage site should make it this easy.

It’s great to see companies acting like good corporate citizens. Too bad we’re not seeing it.

Several of their members are directly linking to images on our site. Even if you ignore the copyright issue, the fact remains that they’re taking the images off of our server, costing us money for bandwidth to pretty up their pages.

You’d think that informing their customer service dept. would get some results. Nope. Apparently it’s our problem and we should modify our server configuration to stop it. According to their manager of member services, that’s their “position” on the matter.

Call me crazy, but when a company has been informed that illegal activities are taking place on their premises and they don’t do anything about it…aren’t they in fact participants?