I got busted the other day. I logged on my blog and noticed something was different. The garage sale picture I used had a green background all of a sudden. I thought this was odd because I just linked to it from another site, but then I looked more closely. Turns out, the picture also had a message just for me.

I'm a lazy blogger. I'm stealing bandwidth from bestbuffalohomes.com.

It was a shock to get called out like that. I really hadn't thought I was doing anything wrong, let alone stealing. But I took the link to the picture out of the post just to make sure.

The incident has made me question my policy of borrowing pictures from other sites. The only reason I do it is to spice up my pages, and if I learned anything from my newspaper design experience, it's the difference a good picture can make. But it has also made me wonder about the nature of ownership on the Internet, and what rules there ought to be.

The funniest thing to me about the rebuke wasn't that I was stealing the picture. I'm sure it was just a stock photo anyway that I could have downloaded for free if I had taken the time. (That's probably why he called me "lazy".)

The most precious commodity on the Internet might be bandwidth. This probably isn't a great analogy because I'm not much of a network administrator, but bandwidth refers to the size of the pipe you have chosen to control the flow of information in and out of your site. Most of us don't have to worry about it. We can make due with whatever little pipe our hosting provider gives us. My Bluehost site even advertises unlimited bandwidth, although I hear the admins ask you to upgrade when you start getting thousands of hits a day.

But larger organizations need more dataflow and, to extend the metaphor to its most absurd level, they zealously guard their pipes from encroaching roots or clogs. I guess that makes me a big wad of toilet paper then.

Honestly, most of the time, someone is not going to mind if you link to a picture or post on another blog. A lot of times it will drive some traffic to the site. But the lesson I gleaned from this, and something I'm going to do better, is askfor permission first. It's really the neighborly thing to do, even on the Internet where you'll probably never see your neighbor face-to-face. So thanks for the lesson, Best Buffalo Homes, and here's to keeping your bandwidth flowing!