I found this via : it seems that when Great American ex-Maverick John McCain’s campaign put together his MySpace page, they used a template created by , the founder and CEO of . That’s ok, though. Davidson allows people to use his template gratis, as long as they credit him. McCain’s people didn’t credit him. Not good. But they took it a little further than that: they hotlinked images from Davidson’s server. That’s really bad form. You don’t do that to people. Apart from the fact that it’s rude, it’s also unsafe.

All Davidson had to do was create a new image, give it the name of an image McCain was using, and voom — the new image was on McCain’s page. Now, he could have stuck a picture up there if he wanted to. It’s his server, after all. But he was far more gentle about it:

John McCain on gay marriage

As Davidson put it, “The Straight-Talk Express isn’t just for straight people anymore.”

I did something similar a few years ago when some schmuck selling watches on ebay thought he could get away with hotlinking images of my friend Anna on his pages. I run Anna’s site, so I renamed the picture he was using and replaced it with an image of text reading something like, “Don’t buy watches from people who steal pictures from other people’s sites.” And the image stayed up there for about a week before the schmuck noticed it.

Let this be a lesson to rude webmasters the world over. Don’t steal from people who know what they’re doing.

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