Bandwidth stealing is a common problem on the Internet. People that connect their sites or their blogs to content that located on someone else site, the immediate result is that they save money (the other one is paying for the storage and the bandwidth). But the real result is that they gave away the control over their content to someone else.
When I want to place a video on my website I convert it and upload it to my site. I am paying for the space it requires and for the bandwidth that it demands. Recently I discovered that some people are still stupid enough to attempt bandwidth stealing (i.e. To link their sites directly to my videos). I am not Youtube and my site is not a hosting service for anyone. I am paying quite a lot of money for these privileges (disk space and traffic).
Once someone linked his site to my videos I can immediately find out about it, this statistics element is called “Entery page” i.e. The page where people started in when they came to their site. If this site is a video then it cannot be legitimate linking (because none of the videos in my sites are independent and all runs with a player). Once I identified it I now have a control over this specific site. I can create a new file with the same name that will include: advertising (for me, my customers or anyone else) or if I am really angry I can place there a pornographic movie or simply rename my records and the parasite website will have a dead link. Actually around the world this phenomenon is disappearing, however, every few days I find a new attempt by a new website, and I am really ashamed to say so… I discovered that these pity, stupid thieves are always …. Israelis. Its a shame but its a fact.