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Comment by JepZ | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it either... It's like calling a lawyer because Google links to your page.

This isn't linking, this is hotlinking: taking unattributed images. If you had some nice images on your site that I'd put on mine, presenting them as my own, while still using your bandwidth to serve them to my users how would you feel about it? What about if I was the richest company on the planet already?

So all this is about is bandwidth and attribution?!? I mean aren't they sending their users to your web page? Other people would be glad if they would just have to pay the hosting costs for an image to get people on their page.

> mean aren't they sending their users to your web page?

No, in this specific case, they are sending images from the page to users, bypassing the actual page.

For a site where the user value was in the image and the monetization was elsewhere on the page, it's capturing the value of your work and bypassing the mechanism which pays you for that work. It may be legal, but even if so it is not sustainable.

This “linking vs hotlinking” distinction is pointless. It’s an image sitting at a URL. A browser can request that image and display it. If you don’t want people to view images you publish publicly, then don’t publish them or require authentication in order to request them.

They are showing the image. Did you read the post? There's no attribution, you wouldn't know at first glance it came from his website. Even the shortcut is only called "Guitar Chord Finder" and never mentions his website. You need to edit the shortcut to find it.

Sounds to me like theft.

You mean like stealing someone's business cards in order to promote his company?

No, like stealing bandwidth and services.

If you're taking the business cards and cutting the contact information off them and then handing them out, that's theft.

This is more than just straight linking though, this is pulling content without attribution nor financial remuneration. To use the Google example, it would be like a 3rd party YouTube app that bypassed Google's advertising while still streaming content from YouTube's servers. Which is something Google have clamped down on in the past.

Would there be a difference, if Apple had downloaded the content and was serving it from its own hosts? (As far as an app user is concerned, there isn't much of a difference.) Now add to this the hosting fees / resources used…

This would actually cross the line. Right now there's a strong argument that Shortcuts is just acting as an images-only web browser, (like Lynx, but the opposite). If Apple actually copied the images to their own servers then they're copying the author's work without his authorization.

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