A. Bandwidth theft occurs because someone copies a picture from another web site and pastes it into their messages or into their custom pages.
Most web sites other then groups are paid for on a monthly basis and that payment is based on how many times the website is visited or opened for viewing.
By copying and pasting a picture, everytime that picture is viewed the amount of space that is charged against the original website is counted as being viewed. It is similar to someone connecting a hose to your plumbing and using your water to wash their car or water the lawn. Imagine someone plugging an extension into your outside wallplug and running their household appliances with your power. Would you be upset? I would!
MSN Groups is used by millions of people and if we used the copy and paste method on all of our pictures, most website owners would become upset at the prices they would have to pay.
If you have permission, save the picture to your hard drive and then upload it to your group. Then link the picture to your custom pages or messages.
Of course, having permission to use copyrighted material is also something to watch out for when uploading something to your hard drive. Make sure you have permission. Without permission or stealing bandwidth can result in groups being shuttered by MSN Groups.
When a group is shuttered, nobody can go into that group and all members lose their storage space. The allotment of space is not given back.
Copying a graphic from one of your groups to another group is allowed because the bandwidth of all groups are owned by MSN and they allow bandwidth transfers within MSN Groups.
