Comments on: Stealing bandwidth through inline linking

By: Mandi

Mandi — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 07:07:55 +0000

I wouldn’t have had any idea that the linking to your image would have used your bandwidth – there are a lot of people now using blogs that don’t have broader computer knowledge – which is great that you can use them without needing to know how to do anything more than type – but can cause some problems.

I think copyright is largely ignored by retail users (i.e. an individual setting up a personal site) as there isn’t any real punishments in place, and who would police it anyway?

Small world though, that one of you pics would winde up being used on some far off blog… its a compliment to the pic, but not cool to be be taking others works without asking

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 10:34:00 +0000

Thanks guys for the suggestions. I’m not so concerned about the copyright thing, so I’m not going to get too upset about it. Thus, I’ve decided that I should just mark the photo with a copyright notice so that my name gets out there. And I’ll probably implement the robots.txt protection mechanism soon.

By: Eydie

Eydie — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:11:36 +0000

oops! I misspoke. The site doesn’t appear to be Chinese – my bad. But that still doesn’t negate how wrong it was for a profitable publication to steal pix.

By: Eydie

Eydie — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:09:02 +0000

Sounds like the usual intellectual property disregard so rampant in that country. Part of my job at one expat mag was to find photos on the Internet and give their location to the art director to steal. Cheap asses didn’t want to have to actually buy any photos. (Most mags didn’t do this though, to be fair to the population at large.)

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 20:24:49 +0000

What about a robots.txt file in the root of your default images directory? Then it won’t get crawled or indexed. Here’s some linkage:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html

I dunno Darren. I’m in a malicious mood today. I would replace the picture to one of the same keyword but minus the letter ‘L’.

Everyone likes a rooster.

By: Allan

Allan — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:35:44 +0000

You have to admit, replacing the image with a lewd, unecpected, or “I am a thief of bandwidth” sign is probably the more fun. To be mature, you probably need to ask her about it, but it seems there could also be a language barrier.

The question becomes — do you want your images and bandwidth protected, or are you more concerned with your remarkably clear photo of a clock getting travel-time? She should take a copy and host that image on her own site, so long as you don’t care to retain your copyrights.

If you’re doing nothing, I would recommend immediately watermarking the photo if it’s not already, and replace it with a photo that is the same but smaller-size (photoshop lets you choose a target filesize) and a “Please Talk to Me About Using This Image” sign over the middle part.

…at least it starts dialog, and if you don’t go with the sign, you have a watermarked copyrighted (copywritten, even though it’s Right, not Write?) image.