What is Bandwidth Theft???
Bandwidth theft is sort of copyright theft, but this involves stealing the "Space" off another web site.
Bandwidth is the frequency the net runs on. Heard of servers crashing because too many people try to access a site at the same time? That is what bandwidth in action - or rather not enough bandwidth available.
Each website is alotted so much space/memory that it take to display that site and for people to access it. On WWW sites you pay for that space and if you run out of it your site crashes - or is taken off line.
Occasionally, you come to sites at YAHOO that will say this site has used its bandwidth allowance up, try again in an hour. That is because Yahoo groups limits how much space your group can have - exceed that and they punish you by making it unavailable.
At MSN, you don't really worry about this, because each site is not alotted any specific amount - MSN's alot the GROUPS as a whole.
NOTE
{You can copy and paste within an MSN group or from one MSN group to another. All MSN groups share bandwidth, so that's not a problem}
But on www sites you are alotted what you pay for, which cause a lot of problems when people COPY and Paste from a site.
First off - you are committing copyright theft. But on those sites you are also stealing their "space." In other words, using the bandwidth they are PAYING for!!
If you copy an image from a www site and paste on your MSN site - it will show on your page. But is it not MSN's space you are using that has that image - it is the site you stole it from.
The more people copy from sites, the more it ties up space and can eventually cripple a site and take it out all together.
Some web hosting services will take a site off line for a month for going over their limit.
You work hard to make and maintain your site, but suddenly you cannot access it, no one can access it because people are linking to your backgrounds and images.
It is against the law to do this, so when you copy and paste from another site you not only are breaking copyright laws you are in violation of bandwidth theft and this is ACTIONABLE in court.
If you are caught stealing from a www site in this manner they can sue you for the money it costs them, even for lost time off line because when their sites are not working they are losing money.
This is NOT the same if you have two sites at MSN groups and you store stuff on one site and paste it into another. This does not apply. It is only bandwidth thief in the groups if you copy and paste from a site without permission. So yes, you have a work site and copy images to your main site.
MSN groups official stance on one group stealing from another by bandwidth thieft is they are grouped in the same violation as copyright. The report goes to Ms. Weston, who is a Copyright Investigator at MSN.
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