Saturday, March 05, 2005

Disrespectful Link

Today BoingBoing posted a link to a North Korean government flash movie advertising trips to N. Korea. When I clicked on the link the movie it wasn't there. Instead this message was in it's place:
Access to the requested object was denied.

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.

Questions can be sent to support@korea-dpr.com for technical advice.

Thank you and have a nice day
What? The official website of North Korea doesn't have enough money to pay for bandwidth so it's disrespectful for another site to link to their's? Most people would be happy if a large site linked to their own, even if they couldn't afford the bandwidth charge. After that happens another person (or people) offers to host the content to share with others.

Update:
Turns out the site is not what it claims to be. It's government approved, but it's run by a guy in Barcelona. He changed the error message and the copyright notice at the bottom to one that allows others to copy and distribute their work.