What does the message in the sprites gallery mean, in layman terms?

Question

Note: hotlinking our images uses bandwidth and costs us money. Please show your support by linking back to us (as in the provided code). Sites that cost us excessive bandwidth without linking may be blocked.

Which is fine and all, but what exactly does it mean?

Comments

High internet costs money and using images hosted on the site uses a lot of said internet. Using the link instead of just copying the image brings people back to the site and helps make up the cost a little.

---

High speed internet, you mean?
Also, copying images where? In our answers? Does PM mean that Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V is data consuming, whereas putting the url directly in the answer using the option given is better?

Answer 1

Say you’re using images from the Database on your own site. Whenever someone accessed a page on your site that has a DB image on it, their computer needs to contact this site’s server, using up the server’s bandwidth, which I believe is somewhat comparable to phone data (maybe not a 100% accurate analogy; I haven’t studied server-client systems as much as I’d like). If your theoretical site is really small, this usually doesn’t have a very big impact, but bigger sites that get visited often cost more bandwidth and would end up making this site more expensive to maintain as a result. PM allows people to use images from here so long as they have a link to the DB from their site, in order to get more ad revenue to offset the cost of bandwidth. Big sites that don’t link to here will be blocked from using images.

Comments

So we don't have to link here if we download and re-upload the images to another site?

---

No, but don't do that anyway because linking back here supports the site. So do that.

---

Thanks a ton. So this message isn't really for Pokebase users, right?

That said, how does PM own the rights to these images? If he got them from Veekun or whatever, can't the sites do the same? Do sites often take sprites from pokemondb.net?

---

Well, he doesn't own the rights to the images (Game Freak / Nintendo do), but he does own the bandwidth. If he was asking for other webmasters to pay money for using the images, that might end in a lawsuit (once again, haven't indulged that much in law studies), but just asking for a link keeps it in the realm of fair use. PM blocking people from using the images is more of him preventing them from using the bandwidth than the images themselves, since, as you and sumwun pointed out, you could easily take the images from other sites or upload them to your own server.
As for your second question, I'm afraid I don't really know how often other sites take from the DB's gallery.