Hotlinking : what can you do about it ?
What is hot linking ?
It’s when somebody embeds an image directly from your website. It looks as if they’re hosting the image, but they use your bandwidth, sometimes without even crediting you with a link.
(This is something I don’t like about flock by the way : it encourages hot-linking when you use the “blog this” or “web clip board” feature. Same problem with many “web clipping” services).
Some people import entire feeds with the content of other blogs. All texts and images are copied. it’s called Blog scraping, or a splog (spam blog).
An example is this guy (hey, you, you finally got linked to !) who consistently imports ALL my posts (and many others form other sources) into his splog.
How to tackle it : you can put a watermark in your images (like a copyright or your site’s name in a more or less transparent way), or you can use a wordpress plug in, or you can use a custom “ht-access” file to point all hot-linked images to a default image… That’s when the fun starts !
So what people do, is they replace the image with another one that displays a completely different message, just where your original image was supposed to appear..
Here is a small compilation of the best I found (not hotlinked, and credited I hope, to their authors). Thank you Google images by the way.
From the French Barbablog:
Caption reads :
“I know it’s a bit rude, but I pay for my bandwidth, so if you want to use the images of this site without asking anything to me, at least, host them yourself. In the meantime, I greet you with this friendly sign..”
And here are some also funny or creative ones :
Movv :
B4it :
Greyduck :
Darkcus :
A good lesson..
Thx Delphine for the idea..
January 25th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Ugh. I hate this. I take it case by case. A teenage girl in Eastern Europe has a page full of my pictures of New York. So I left them and just watermarked at the bottom so visitors would know they are mine. If it’s a message board, I just rename the picture. If it seems like a reasonable person’s blog, I write them (or comment - so many people don’t have e-mail addresses on their blogs, it’s amazing). And sometimes I send a message instead, but I still try to be nice.
http://undreadchef.blogspot.com/2007/01/geez.html
January 25th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I really must get round to sorting out my htaccess, although i am guilty of hotlinking once or twice myself! Sometimes it’s just easier than uploading it to my own site!