Websites

I find it... amusing that an article on not having to give credit back to the original author of a ghost written piece should be utilizing a picture that I created in Gimp from a stock xchng photograph, and they have it hotlinked from my website.

Apparently Carrie, contributor to Naturally Working Mom and owner of NaturalMomsTalkRadio.com, does not believe in giving credit even when she is legally bound to do so. (Click image to see it full sized)

That pretty in pink writer there in the image is hotlinked to Phantascene.com. You click on her at the original website I got the above from and ask to see the information and it shows the image source as: http://www.phantascene.com/images/woman%20writer.jpg That, my friends is a hotlink.

Hotlinking is classified as petty theft. You are taking the bandwidth of the site from which you have hotlinked the image and whenever your page loads up it causes the image to be pulled from the hosting site you stole it from. Yes, stole. That bandwidth adds to the rest of the bandwidth that is being used and - when the website is using more than it is allotted in a month, the website owner is billed by their hosting company for the extra amount of bandwidth used.

That, my friends, is called petty theft. The best explanation I have seen for how it works is imagine that someone taps into your electricity without your knowing.

I'll take that a step further with an example:

Your neighbor sneaks over the fence, snakes a extension cord under it and carefully hides it in the grass over to the side of your house. He then plugs the extension cord into an outside outlet on your house and dashes back home, unrolling coax cable to his place to hook up to the television he set up in his garage for him and his buddies to watch the Big Game on.

He could have asked if he could borrow the television signal from your satellite dish, he could have asked if he could borrow a little power to run the TV. But he figures that it's your television signal, let you pay the power bill and he'll just watch it for a little while. What harm can there be?

Now, you are not noticing the power seeping out, so the Neighbor leaves the power hooked up and him and his buddies continue to enjoy the television at your expense. Eventually you get your power bill and "Holy Cow! Where's that spike in power use coming from? What do you mean I owe that much more on my electricity bill this month?" You weren't even home for Pete's sake, you were on vacation. So, you start looking for where the leak is and lo and behold you find it... a little orange power cord and a black coax cable hidden in the grass running under the fence and to your neighbor's garage.

What do you do?

Well... a lot of people take the course of going back home, unhooking the cable for the TV signal and hooking it up to a VCR playing hard core porn. This is easy enough to do since all you have to do is change a little information on your website and viola! Neighbor's watching porn! or your great aunt's boring vacation movies, or two dogs going at it in the park, or anything else that you decide to trade off for the picture that the thief took.

As you can see, it can be dangerous to steal someone's images.

I've heard of people that were sent nasty e-mails by folks assuming that MySpace was hacked because suddenly massive images have changed and showed the guy's website URL on them. All he did was what he is fully entitled to do and changed the picture on his own website. GASP! How dare he mess with their images! The nerve of him. ::shakes head:: I know there are a lot of people out there that don't know they did anything wrong because of plain stupidity on how the Internet works, but I've also seen cases of a guy saying that he changed his image and the dude that stole it going back to his site, finding the unchanged copy and hotlinking it AGAIN. You can not say that guy was not aware he was stealing. Particularly when the third time he stole it from someone else's site to avoid the picture being changed again.

Anyway, the point is that it's theft people. I don't mind if my images are linked to under certain conditions, but I want the people that take them, and my bandwidth, to at least give me something in return. Link back to my website, give a nod of thanks for my being kind enough to host the image for you. Otherwise you may wake up and find something undesirable on your site one morning when I get a bill from my hosting company for excess bandwidth use and go swapping images. And yes, it can be done on a site by site basis so I can put a nasty pic on sites C and E and leave the original on sites A, B, D, F and G. My two current favorites are:

And......

What do ya think?