Image Leeches
My website, RocketJam.com has a lot of images on it. There are photos, graphics I created in Photoshop and even some drawings that I've done. Many of the top-level pages on the site also have a section-themed graphic. You can easily find images like these via the image search that Google, Yahoo and most other search engines have available today.
A fairly common problem on the internet for website owners is the practice of hotlinking. This is when someone on another website (usually, the free, social/blog type sites like MySpace) links directly to one of the graphics on your website to display it on their own website. Besides the issue of copyright infringement, they are using the bandwidth you are paying for to display your images on their site.
I get a fair amount of this occurring with the graphics on RocketJam.com which shows up in the site's log files. As long as people aren't using my art and graphics in some type of for-profit venture I generally don't mind if people want to use them on their personal pages/blogs/forum posts or whatever. They don't even have to give me credit for them (which is good, because they don't). I'm actually usually flattered that they liked the image(s) enough to want to use them.
The thing that bothers me is the practice of hotlinking to them. You can easily save images from a webpage to your computer by right-clicking them and choosing the "Save Image As..." option, or, with a Mac you can just drag the image to your desktop to save it. Then you can upload it directly to your own web page or a picture hosting service such as Flickr and link to them there. This makes everyone happy. If you're really respectful of other people's property, you might even shoot them an email asking if they mind if you use their image.
I ignore most of the hotlinking that happens to my site since the bandwidth used is generally not worth the trouble of trying to eliminate the problem. However, I had a problem this past week and a half or so with a MySpace site. A girl with aspirations to become a model or actress or something had linked to an 18KB graphic. This was a very attractive girl and her page is peppered with pictures of her in scant clothing and suggestive poses. Her page apparently gets quite a bit of traffic because it generated a noticable spike in my website's bandwidth. The 18KB graphic she linked to had used over 700MB of my bandwidth in that week and a half! Besides the bandwidth she was stealing from me, it also skews the statistics I get from the server log files, making it difficult to determine how much traffic is coming to my site versus how much is going to sites like hers.
When I first discovered the problem, I created a MySpace account, just so I could send her a message, kindly asking her to not link directly to the image on my site. I told her she could use the image, but she needed to download it and host it on her own site. After waiting 4 or 5 days and getting no response, I took steps to break her link.
There are greater steps you can take to eliminate all hotlinking from your site, but they all have drawbacks to some extent. Unless the problem gets a lot worse for me, I'll continue to handle these incidents on a case by case basis.
A fairly common problem on the internet for website owners is the practice of hotlinking. This is when someone on another website (usually, the free, social/blog type sites like MySpace) links directly to one of the graphics on your website to display it on their own website. Besides the issue of copyright infringement, they are using the bandwidth you are paying for to display your images on their site.
I get a fair amount of this occurring with the graphics on RocketJam.com which shows up in the site's log files. As long as people aren't using my art and graphics in some type of for-profit venture I generally don't mind if people want to use them on their personal pages/blogs/forum posts or whatever. They don't even have to give me credit for them (which is good, because they don't). I'm actually usually flattered that they liked the image(s) enough to want to use them.
The thing that bothers me is the practice of hotlinking to them. You can easily save images from a webpage to your computer by right-clicking them and choosing the "Save Image As..." option, or, with a Mac you can just drag the image to your desktop to save it. Then you can upload it directly to your own web page or a picture hosting service such as Flickr and link to them there. This makes everyone happy. If you're really respectful of other people's property, you might even shoot them an email asking if they mind if you use their image.
I ignore most of the hotlinking that happens to my site since the bandwidth used is generally not worth the trouble of trying to eliminate the problem. However, I had a problem this past week and a half or so with a MySpace site. A girl with aspirations to become a model or actress or something had linked to an 18KB graphic. This was a very attractive girl and her page is peppered with pictures of her in scant clothing and suggestive poses. Her page apparently gets quite a bit of traffic because it generated a noticable spike in my website's bandwidth. The 18KB graphic she linked to had used over 700MB of my bandwidth in that week and a half! Besides the bandwidth she was stealing from me, it also skews the statistics I get from the server log files, making it difficult to determine how much traffic is coming to my site versus how much is going to sites like hers.
When I first discovered the problem, I created a MySpace account, just so I could send her a message, kindly asking her to not link directly to the image on my site. I told her she could use the image, but she needed to download it and host it on her own site. After waiting 4 or 5 days and getting no response, I took steps to break her link.
There are greater steps you can take to eliminate all hotlinking from your site, but they all have drawbacks to some extent. Unless the problem gets a lot worse for me, I'll continue to handle these incidents on a case by case basis.
posted by RocketJam at 10:29 AM
2 Comments:
hi Rjay,
i have heard this before-- the story was from a women getting big bills (hundreds of dollars) from her host for hundreds of extra hits on her website because of a link from a porn site. she said it would have been nice to get business from that, but it didn't happen. is it hard to break a link like this once it's established?
nice graphics, photos,...i like your perspective.
Thanks Molly, I'm glad you like them. :-)
It's really a good outlet for me; I enjoy working on it.
I know hotlinking is really a problem for some people. Fortunately my hosting plan is really generous with bandwidth and this recent incident is the most serious I've experienced. It's more the principle of the thing that bothers me.
As for breaking her link, I just chopped the image into two pieces and put them together in a table. The image and file name she linked to is gone and it will be more difficult for her to link to a multipiece graphic.
Beyond that, you can use access files that you put on your web server or there are scripts you can run on your server that will stop people from doing this. There are some drawbacks to the access file method and I don't want to go as far as setting up a script if I don't have to. :-P
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