This question has also semi interested me as well. I can give you my own version of why...You offer an ecommerce solution to your customer (reffered to as 'the merchant'). The merchant is interested in selling intangible items such as information (websites, documentation) or files (apps and downloadable documents) to his customers. The problem is he doesn't want customer A purchasing product X and posting/spreading the link he used to get to product X OR using product X as a means of guessing links to product Y or product Z.
Now lets put a real twist in this whole thing:) Some merchants don't mind housing files on a server owned by you, while other merchants can't and/or won't leave their merchandise on your machines, they want your ecommerce solution to point to something off site.
Now the demand I get all the time is "I don't want my customers to know the link" or something along those lines so they in essence, get a one time download. The closest I can get is severely screwing up the address and making it near impossible for a non-technical customer to identify the address, but I have yet to even imagine a possibility of truly "hiding" an address.
I think I could write a decent portaling system if the files were housed on my side, but 90% of the requests are for an offsite file/location.

I can sort of see the logic in why this is impossible. "If you WANT someone to have something, why are you trying to hide it at the same time?"


How is that for a valid "why?" :)
hehe


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