Framing web pages

[Oren Beck]

I have been following this a bit and it seems to have ethical
breakpoints and several logistical issues at minimum.

The most basic being the ethics of blatant theft. Both bandwidth and
content theft combined in an example of kleptomania seeking proper
reward. OUR ethics then become not so much if we arrange proper credit
to thieves but how gracious we are or are not in doing so.  That
refers to the "poison images" option mentioned earlier. Angelfire had
a trick where hot linking to their pages "overlaid" an almost moire
pattern of their logo rendering the images quite useless to the
thieves. I cannot comment on the how- but the result made it quite
clear that the cretin claiming an Angelfire user's stuff as being
owned differently was an incompetent thief. WE also are not talking
Bill Gate's J-Dollars costing of "stolen software" This is more about
the claims of ownership and reputation at stake. The real dollar costs
of  Bandwidth etc are almost bordering on civil criminality if it's
profiting an infringing bad actor.

Thus, if no one disputes the difference between "fair use" and frank
outright theft we are seeing this get a bit more on solid moral
ground.
Those claiming  that "cost" is not a factor would change their tune if
it were their bill for per hit costs going way up. Or their images
being used in ways they would rather not. That is in many cases  *WAY*
afield of the aforementioned fair use. To border on oxymoronic to
dispute what is or not fair. IF it's questionable maybe we should
default to asking the content owner before WE link stuff for a
customer!

In that last thought lies my ethics pitch. While there are those who
have the skills to steal both content and bandwidth, relabeling both
as if another were the rightful owner- I suspect the majority of such
theft is done |"for hire"
As in "White or Black hat web developers hitting the dark side.
Both by active filching and passive failure to lock down items NOT
intended to be "shared" Creative Commons or Conventional Copyright
assignments sort of both break if our ethics do not support a rule of
law.

SO we have the ethics of theft being not only wrong in itself- but
arguably making us -the technical class, passive accomplices. For
failing to make it duly rewarded as the crime it is.

 And furthermore- it's an opening for the Open Source world to PROVE
that we are better at real security than the closed models ever can
be.