July 18, 2000

2:16 PM

Breakin' dah law breakin' dah law!The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not plagiarize... The following was blatantly copypasty stolen. An Important Note Regarding Netiquette: Under no circumstances is credit on a "links" page a way of giving back to the creatives of the web: its an afterthought that limps pathetically around the back corners of your site, while our work brings the main pages to life. So use the Web, but no linking! Just WHAT PLANET have these offended artists been on since 1994? Why are they suddenly freaking out now?
posted by ZachsMind (4 comments total)

You didn't read the page that carefully-you can link to people all you want on your links page, it's just that if you use shareware webgraphics from a site it's more polite if you link to that site somewhere on the page you're using the graphics, so people don't think that you made them yourself.
posted by Electric Elf at 2:52 PM on July 18, 2000

Really? Would everyone agree with you on that? Would Ulrich? Would the Artist's Coalition Against Privacy agree with you? Every single member? Any page with links on it can be argued to be a links page. Lines are being drawn, and with the courts and legislators getting involved, 'Netiquette' could someday soon become legislation. Do you like the direction this is going? Cuz I don't.
posted by ZachsMind at 3:06 PM on July 18, 2000

If I'm not mistaken, I think that what they most get up in arms about is people ripping off their stuff without giving proper credit, and that most of the deal with linking is this: linking to the graphics stored on their server when you "steal"/"borrow" their graphics to use on your site. Being concerned with this is a reasonable argument - "bandwidth robbery" isn't polite, especially when it can cost the original site owner, depending on what sort of server they're using.

As for the linking to give credit to linkware graphics, I think Electric Elf said it more succintly than I could.

Then again, I could be reading that page at the webjewels site completely wrong =]
posted by sammy at 10:16 PM on July 18, 2000

Also, they're not just "freaking out now." Moyra's Web Jewels has been around for years, and she's always had the 11th Commandment on her site.
posted by jason at 10:08 AM on July 23, 2000