"Now that's a story I'd like to hear, as I'm sure would Wired News. Was he framing the site in ads like the court case? Or was he simply linking to a page? There is a difference."
I believe he was linking to the streams.

"Cory, perhaps I posted in haste at first. I do think we can work issues like this out without the courts."

I'm glad to hear it.

'However, I don't think the countermeasures you refer to as "trivial" are so easy. Try running a high traffic Real Media server and then see how you like other people linking into the streams.'

It's not as though NPR has ads on the pages that link to its Real streams, the revenue from which direct-linkers deprive it of -- NPR has put the streams online for one purpose, to encourage people to listen to them.

It's also worth noting that NPR has many other remedies available to it if it wishes to offset bandwidth costs, including replacing its streams with downloadables and inviting others to mirror them.

"(And that's not Apache, so no clever workarounds. I have a friend in the biz who says there's no way to prevent someone from linking to a Real Audio stream on your server. When enough people do that, it gets expensive fast. That's probably why NPR has that form in the first place.)"

Hardly a ringing endorsement of Real's technology; reason enough to damn Real for creating and deploying a technology that begs for legal remedies that distort the link-without-permission nature of the Internet.

"Or try running a multi-thousand page site with no CMS. You want me to ad de-framing javascript to every page? Sure it's optional, but it's hardly trivial."

If you've got apache-fu, it's still straightforward to parse every outbound page to insert the javascript at serve-time. If you know a little perl or python, you can bulk-insert an ssi directive or the javascript itself.

Both of these are still trivial procedures relative to, say, requiring every person who wishes to deploy a framing service to seek permission from every page that he might someday frame (imagine if Google Images or About had to do this -- securing permission for every document in a multi-billion-document-Internet makes inserting a few thousand SSI directives seem trivial indeed.)