nitid - 2:15 am on Jul 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

I run a small fan site that recommends stories written by other fans (aka fanfic recommendations)
and I am disturbed by the number of archives that are coming up with a 'no deep linking' policy.

For example, one of the biggest fan fiction archives out there, The Gossamer Project,[krycek.gossamer.org ], has this to say about linking:

We do not permit "deep linking," which is when you provide a link directly to one of the stories on our site. Such links remove the context around the story and replace it with your own. We expend a considerable amount of effort to index and display stories in a consistent, readable format. Linking directly to the stories makes them appear to be part of your site instead of ours and imposes a substantial drain on our resources to serve those stories.

And another site that says:
This website is one that costs money for me to maintain and as such, I frown deeply on bandwidth theft. That is linking to any text, image, or HTML file associated with my site. It's not polite and is ethically questionable.

However when I deep link, I make it clear that this is offsite content, ie.

<Direct Story Link to Html File> by Author [<Some Big Archive's Front Page>]

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but I don't understand the 'bandwidth theft' argument. If I point the way directly to a story, it uses less bandwidth than forcing the user to go through the front page, and drilling down 3 or 4 pages, which is more bandwidth, not less. Maybe they are confusing this with the 'content ownership' issue?