Assuming it’s static, though, then it’s quite easy. The preserving site ought to be in a single place, hosted by a single server, and any hotlinked content should be downloaded and preserved alongside it. The legality of such a download is a completely different question, obviously, but a one-shot download is not a bandwidth suck.

But it just seems like common courtesy that if someone want to use an image on my site they’ll download the image and host it themselves. I’m not in the image hosting business. For while you can copy an image (i.e. save an instance of it on your own computer/server) you can’t copy bandwidth. That’s a measurable resource.

I mean, what if someone jacked into my home power line and used the power they jacked to create some cool work of art with it? The power is a measurable resource that costs someone something. I think there’s a difference between “intellectual property” and “physical property.” One is a vague term that (in my opinion) is goofy, and the other is a very tangible term, literally.

Occasionally one sees terms of service on a corporate web site that say “no linking to our web site” or “only link to our front page” accompanied by appropriate legalese.

I’m not sure what teeth that legalese has. But it seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Web is about.

Here at the farm, we’re trying to make some headway on the last of these, but there’s no reason why this “recipe” based architecture we’ve built cannot be applied to music and movies too.

In cooking, you can give someone the recipe without having to transfer egg property rights — they can just get their own eggs. Similarly, for music or movie remixes, something akin to “pointer remixes” or “recipe-driven remixes” could be copied without (?) needing to transfer IP rights.

As long as the consumer has access to suitably-substitutable ingredients (this song on MP3 rather than MP4 or that movie in Flash rather than Quicktime), and the requisite pointer dereferencing / search reco engine tech, in concert with a small program that re-enacts the original remix based on some recipe, the original remixer’s mix can be, more or less, reconstituted wholly “intact”.

~L

Hotlinking would not be an essential part of the ‘MySpace profile masterpiece.’ Where the image is hosted doesn’t affect whether the profile is a masterpiece or not, so why should the owner of the content be required to maintain it or pay for bandwidth. If the work is licensed for use in remix or if the use in remix is ‘fair use’ then the remixer should be making a copy and hosting on their own so as to not incur any cost to the original host/creator.

Also, is hotlinking really ‘pointing’? Pointing would seem to imply something that leads the viewer/experiencer to the original creator. A link is pointing, but most people wouldn’t consider hotlinking an image pointing because nothing about it says, “Go to this site.” If for some reason the source of the image is important to the remixed product (if the user seeing the remixed thing is expected to know where the image comes from to enhance the experience) there are other ways to indicate this other than hotlinking.