(cross-posted from NKzone)
On Saturday Boingboing posted an item about a North Korea tourism promotion video on the [North] Korean Friendship Association's website. Boingboing has hundreds of thousands of readers, so the pointer caused an unprecedented spike in traffic to the KFA's website. Did the KFA welcome this traffic? No. Now when you click on the video link you get this message:
Due to some inconsiderate people linking directly to our multimedia we were forced to take the content offline since it generated too much traffic.
This kind of careless linking to high-profile sites is typical of the internet where people no longer respect that such links could make free content less available.
We will never charge money to pay for the bandwidth, so if people are going to expect high-quality content they should make their own copy of the large file and share it from their own server.
Boingboing points out this contradicts the website's "unfriendly copyright notice" (see bottom of linked page). But never mind...Boingboing has taken their advice and you can watch the video here.
The incident has generated much mirth , joking, and tittering in cyberspace. One Boingboing reader writes:
I yanked the kickass soundtrack from the North Korean Delegation animation. Quite frankly, I'm sticking this in iTunes and keeping it on repeat on my iPod as I ride the Greyhound to New York City for 8 hours. Meanwhile, remixers, start your engines!
The yanked audio is here.
Will Pyongyang retaliate? Will they unleash a hack attack against Boingboing?? Stay tuned.
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Posted by: ...::JACEK::... | March 07, 2005 at 01:21 AM
It's a conundrum - respect intellectual property by linking to the original, or respect bandwidth limitations by making a copy? Sure would be nice if we could find a workable solution, since the problem crops up all the time.
Posted by: Anna | March 08, 2005 at 11:05 AM