We've been noticing recently that an increasing amount of our bandwidth is being sucked away by blogs and, worse yet, forum members using our copyrighted graphics as member icons. Of course these get read from OUR site every time anyone even accesses a forum thread that the member has ever posted on. In the past it was rare and we would simply change the name of the graphic and replace the old named file with a generic graphic which said 'I stole this graphic from (our domain name)'. However it has become so rampant it is too time consuming just policing the logs and constantly changing all the links from OUR own pages to the photos. We can't simply deny access to the photo by IP. Is there a simple way to deny access to a particular .jpg based on referer? That would be great! In most cases the graphic is resized so small that it is of no use adding a reasonably sized copyright notice, since it is unreadable by time it is shrunk on the screen.
In many of these cases, because we're not members of the forum or a 'friend' of the myspc person, for instance, we can't even get to the page identified in our log where the graphic is being used to find out who is using it or how. We have e-mailed the service provider in many of these cases to notify them of the 'abuse' when we can't see how our own graphic is being used on their site. Increasingly many of the forums, no longer provide contact info outside of the signed-in member area, so we can't even contact THEM anymore. One I just found today from the UK is like this.
Any suggestions what else we can do?
