>Is a service really free if it needs the "free user" to make money? We should differentiate between free and non paying. A service delivered for free is a fre

>Is a service really free if it needs the "free user" to make money? We should differentiate between free and non paying. A service delivered for free is a free service. If that is paid for by monetizing ad views/clicks (that can be ignored and/or blocked by the consumer), its still free for the user, therefore its a free service. The difference between a free service run on donations and a free service run on adds is essentially nothing. Both are monetized free services. At this point we're probably far into opinion territory, so maybe we'll have to agree to disagree here. >hotlinking wasn't done illegally it was a feature that was encouraged to be used. There are people that are dead now who will have empty spaces for images. I think that is rather unfair. Unfair? perhaps. Is it fair to a company to provide life long hosting to those people? Do people expect the company will exist forever and be able to infinitely scale? It wasn't done illegally, but neither was the change to disallow hot-linking unless its paid. >Would they give people a link to where the links were posted? They want people to cough up the money that is why I see it as ransom. That isn't needed, you just login to your account, download your images (if you need to), and you have them all. If you don't remember where those are posted, then its probably not important enough to you to update, and in many cases old content cannot be updated. At that point, the service going away (photobucket going bankrupt and closing for example) needs to be an expected outcome.