I want to preface this topic by making it known that I am extremely computer illiterate. I recently joined something called, "Myspace". It is a website where you can have your own profile and network with millions of other users. I had seen people with cool backgrounds, images and wallpapers, and I wanted to customize my own profile as well. I found caedes.net through a yahoo search when I typed in, "wallpapers". I found an image I really liked, and my boyfriend showed me how to link it to my profile page. Everything seemed like it was going well, the image showed up on my page and then I left it alone. This morning I signed onto Myspace.com and looked at my profile and the background said, "THIS IMAGE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE! CAEDES.NET!". My boyfriend then informed me that I had illegally "pirated" an image. I didn't know what I was doing and I feel bad... I registered as a user here at caedes.net and I'm willing to pay to use the image as wallpaper on my profile. I need some advice on what to do! Please help!!

***Katie

You were supposed to ask first.. Most artists will gladly grand you permissiion.. I did say most, not all.. Some artists don't want their images used anywhere but on your desktop.. ALWAYS ASK FOR PERMISSION FIRST!!!!!!!

I cant help but find it amusing about the 'All caps' in both of your comments...Caedes let it be known very strongly to me not long ago that 'all caps' meant we are yELLING! lol....we all live and learn eh? toooo funny...yes it is always good to ask first, and most of the people on here are very willing to share their talents....there are some very nice people here..that's why I'm stickin' around!

Just to be clear: there were two problems.

1. You didn't ask permission from the image author.

2. You directly linked from the image stored on the caedes.net server (hot linking).

To clarify what the master said in his point #2, the problem is that you cannot link directly to Caedes.net to use wallpaper. His software prevents such activity, because of the bandwidth issues of thousands of people linking directly into his server and downloading their wallpaper repeatedly when they start up their systems instead of only once. Your issue is a classic example. Each time you start your webpage, it downloads another copy of the wallpaper you already downloaded when you initially installed the link. To prevent this from happening, you must download the wallpaper, then link your site to your local copy, not to the one on caedes.net.

That deals with the technical problem. Now on to the ethical one. We who create these wallpapers want you to use our creations. It's why we put them out here. I do not, however want to be cruising the net one day and see my creation adorning someone else's website as though it were theirs. If you want to use one of our wallpaper creations feel free to do so, but we would appreciaite a)being asked first, and b)credit for our creation. I may not speak for all the members here, but for me, I'm glad to have you here, and I'm glad you like our stuff enough to use it, but please don't forget the three rules above. Thanks and welcome to Caedes.net.

I personally don't care if people use my wallpapers, but I'd appreciate getting credit for them and a link back. I put my own creations on my personal website as well as Caedes.

Perhaps you could learn how to make your own wallpapers, that would be another solution to the problem. You just need a paint or fractal program of some kind.

Some websites don't allow you to link to a file on your computer, so if Myspace is one of them, you would have to ask permission, download the image you like, upload the image to a free hosting site such as Photobucket.com, and it will give you the URL to the image.. which you would then apply to Myspace. Not sure if it sounds confusing, but Photobucket makes it very easy to do what you want to do with the background.