Eclectic Echoes

Bandwidth Theft

I have noticed an marked increase in the number of sites and people who have been stealing bandwidth embedding my images on their websites. I don’t mind people using my images – as soon as it is put on line you have to assume someone will use it, with or without your permission – most of the images are licensed under a Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license in fact. Just do me a favor, download the image to your own system/server, all it takes is a Right-Click -> “Save Image As”.

So, to combat the problem… Since most of the violators are teenagers from some of the one-button-push web log sites, I am starting with a limited response. Most are using the images as their backgrounds or as mastheads. So I created an Image Quilt with the 14 most popular images I have found being snaked. I added a little plug and a “Just ask” notice. A little work in .htaccess:

#anti-hotlinking
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !stealImage\.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogger [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace [NC,OR]
... more domain matches here ...
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} xanga [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ http: //www\.heupel\.com/stealImage\.jpg [R,L]

and now any bandwidth stealing image links from banned domains get that image instead of whatever image they were linking to. I know, it’s still getting the bandwidth, but now I can look at it as a sort of advertising. I don’t want to shutdown having outside access to my images, since I myself often link to them from a few photography forums, so doing that would hinder my own use. At the same time I really don’t want to just do nothing either.