watching expired appliances align: of shopping & haircuts

February 16, 2004

of shopping & haircuts

i try to stay away from writing about technology/computer issues since my knowledge in that arena is rather limited. but i must say that i'm not a fan of people stealing bandwidth (direct linking to images on my website). for some reason, it's starting to happen to my photos more and more. sometimes i let it go (and feel guilty), sometimes i just remove the image entirely, and sometimes i replace the image with text over it directing people to my website for a more complete story. unfortunately, i usually don't find out about the theft of an image until the end of the day - after a message board that contains a stolen image has already seen most of its visitors. from now on, it's time to limit the number of shopping cart escalator and faux hawk photos i take.

(i was reminded of all this when i read Are You A Stupid Blogger?)

Posted by marc@balgavy.com at February 16, 2004 02:54 PM

Comments

there's a way to prevent this, adding some code to something called your htaccess file, but I'm not geeky enough to quite understand the process.

Posted by: kfan at February 16, 2004 04:25 PM

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml

Posted by: kfan at February 16, 2004 04:29 PM

Hey there. So to add to the story, a stupid blogger sent the owner of the business whose site she was stealing bandwidth from a nasty letter. She said she was "respectable blogger" and didn't think she was doing anything wrong by using the image. She thought that if the site owner had a problem with the use of the image, they should have emailed her and asked her nicely to remove it. Furthermore, she said that she thought that the images in the google image search were free for the taking. Geez, some peopel are really dumb! Clearly she didn't get the the bigger issue is stealing bandwidth, not some dumb image.

But if people are using your photos, that's really lame. I haven't checked my stats in ages; I have no idea if people are doing that.

Thanks for the trackback ping!

Posted by: Dawn Bustanoby at February 17, 2004 04:52 PM

Okay I don't really understand bandwidth. Or how it works. How does someone steal your bandwidth with pictures? If I right click and save pictures from a website am I stealing bandwidth or just the pictures?

Posted by: Sarah at February 19, 2004 10:52 AM

In that case, Sarah, you are just stealing the photo.

Posted by: Drew at February 20, 2004 01:26 PM