The Lack of Netiquette
romancortes.com
romancortes.com
Second, shouldn't it be possible for Roman to prevent another site from embedding his IFRAME? Either catching the window.parent.location in JavaScript or only serving the IFRAME page if his own domain is in the referrer?
Román Cortés is having a lot of fun with CSS tricks these days. He just built an example rolling CSS coke can that uses background-attachment, background-position, and a few other tricks to get the effect. No fancy CSS3 needed here!
It looks like they gave him full credit for this. Unless he was selling access to this blog post, I'm not sure why this is an issue. It seems even more benign than piracy. (And as sophacles points out, this uses less bandwidth than a direct link, too.)
Clearly, Román is willing to have his bandwidth used in order for people to look at his cool CSS trick. So why is this a problem when it's a little less bandwidth, plus a third-party endorsement?
And, I suppose, sometimes people make a lot of money off of a work and then don't mind copies because they feel like they've already made (and continue to make) much from it.
Perhaps you missed the quite important point that Ajaxian was using this post to drive traffic to their site effectively and selling advertisements based on its, and not their own, merits? They're not just linking to something and showing it to their users, they're getting his paid-for account to serve the content so that they can make advertising revenue off of his work. I think the ethical issue with such an action should be clear.
And he's mad that they might have earned a few dollars from their ads?
Yeah... his content. You're begging the question here, casually skipping over the question of whether they can just appropriate it by trying to draw some sort of stretched equality here. There's an enormous difference between him posting his content and them posting his content!
It wasn't: Ajaxian.bw--; Cortes.bw.noop
It was: Ajaxian.bw -= cost; Cortes.bw += cost
He also does give an example of another site (Smashing Magazine) seeing the post on Ajaxian and believing that the work was the original work of Ajaxian (or a staff member of Ajaxian) and not the work of the real author, so it seems reasonable for him to be upset about this. Especially since his work seems to only be driving fame/publicity for Ajaxian, and not himself.