Finally! A courteous image thief

I was pleasantly suprised

[DrCool]

I was looking through the logs for one of my sites this morning and was starting to get ticked off at all the people who are linking to my images. Many of the links are from various forums or blogs where people want a picture and they just link to mine instead of making their own or at least downloading in on to their own server.

I saw one referring site that was a .edu domain so I decided to check it out. Sure enough my image was at the top of their page. I was getting some ideas together for a harsh email to send them but as I looked down toward the bottom of the page I saw a link saying "Image courtesy of xxxxxxxxx.com" with xxxxxxxx.com being a link back to my site. I started looking through the site and it was someones mid-term project critiquing my major competitor.

The image and link were on about 8 different pages all with PR4+. If all my image thieves would do this I could be dominating my market. So instead of writing a nasty email I sent a thank you email.

Anyone else had similar "good" expierences with image thieves?

[4crests]

After years of this very problem, I decided to join them since I couldn't stop them.

A few weeks ago, I placed a page on my site promoting this idea. I usually charge a fee for my artwork, but I offer it for free to any site that will give me a link. It has been working well, as many of the takers so far have been .EDU and .GOV sites with high PR. The biggest problem so far has been getting them to actually place the link after I give them the artwork. But overall, it's working nicely.

In my situation, the bandwidth doesn't matter, I just hate it when they borrow stuff without my site gaining any benefit.

Yesterday, I actually noticed just the opposite on a website. They had my artwork and gave a link and credit for the artwork to one of my competitor sites. (ARRGGHH).

For the most part though I have found most people are pretty polite when I ask them to either link my page or remove the graphic.

I have only had maybe 2 or 3 times when someone linked my site without me asking for the link, such as your example.

[seindal]

Hi,

I have a site with thousands of photos, and people link them from email newsletters, online fora, guest books etc.

I have made a solution where direct links to my photos gives an image with a message that the photo cannot be displayed legally there but that people can visit my site. You can only see the real photos if you have visited my site within an hour or so.

What happens is more or less this. Somebody searches for photos of something, and finds my site. They grab the the image source and links directly to the photo. It works for them. When somebody else view the page, they see the error image, which displays my message and domain. Usually the link is them changed to the relevant page showing the photo, so I get a real link.

I don't really save much bandwidth, because I have to send the error image, but I do get some links later, and some visitors that see the site on the error image.

I serve the error image as an error document for 403, access denied.

René.

[MWpro]

Hey if its hosted on your server, that means you can change the image and it will also change on their webpage. Rename the actual one on your page and replace the image that they have linked with something else... an advertisement or something funny perhaps? Have fun with it and then edit your access file to block them.

[mahlon]

I found a server where you need a password to see the larger image instead of the thumbnail, he has the password right on the page so you can log-in and see the larger image but I guess this prevents hot-linking!

[kris]

I agree with MWpro. I once replaced an image with an graphic that read in big red letters. "I am a thief! Leave my site now!" They had it on their site for nearly a week before they noticed!

I have heard of others changing the image to embarrasing porn pics or other illicit material. Great fun to see those who steal from you get it in the end.

[Visit Thailand]

We have a big problem with image thieves, but the worst are those that do not load the image onto their own server.

I have had cases of people passing the images off as their own and then giving permission to other people to use them as long as they give a link and credit back to the original theiving site.

[carfac]

Image thieves are bad, but those who steal your images to MAKE MONEY really p*** me off! So I did this!

I did a rewrite so ANY requests from ebay.com for .jpg or .gif get a "special" gif. It says:

"Act now for FREE Next-Day FedEx Shipping... use Paypal and I give you a 25% discount off final bid price!"

My images do not stay up too long...

dave

[4crests]

Carfac, that's hilarious.

so, has anyone had any "GOOD" experiences as DrCool had? It seems most of us have had only bad experiences.

[seindal]

I believe the approach I outlined above all in all gives me a positive result. If people link directly to my images, I post what it essientially an ad for my site. As a consequence most people change their links to one of my html pages. I get a graphic ad or a link. In either case I win.

René.

[carfac]

Without getting too specific (and to stay on Brett's Good Side!), my sites are all on a subject of "artwork of Widgets." Widget's, it seems, are very popular... the sort of thing people just assume are a public-domain sort of item. My problems are two-fold.

Many people, especially those with geocities or other free websites, put up websites of their favorite "widgets" and just assume they can use my pictures of those widget's to decorate their sites. Or, I see my widget pictures show up in forums a lot... Slightly annoying, but forgivable, I think.

Since one site sells the artowrk of widgets, there is a pretty good amount of widget artwork in the world. So, those that want to sell their widget pictures on E-Bay just use my pictures rather that scanning thier own. Just lazy I guess. These are the ones that tweak me. I think if you are going to sell something, you should not rely on other people (your competition, even!) to supply your method of selling. That is why I take such active measures against this sort of use!

Glad you like my Anti-EBay tactic. I would be happy to share the code... just keep in mind you MUST have httpd.conf access, and mod_rewrite. I bet it could be modded to .htaccess use, but I will leave that to those who know that sort of coding better!

Dave

[nvision]

I recently discovered somebody was using an image from one of my sites on their blog - I emailed requesting that they either remove it or give me linked/textual credit for it. Neither one happened so I just copied/edited the image to include my copyright information and url, and changed links to show the proper image on my site and the edited one on theirs.

[weesnich]

A basic protection against hotlinking images is already possible with-in .htaccess using "SetEnvIfNoCase referer"

If it wasnt posted before and anyone is interested I can post an example - on wrong referrers it delivers another image specially designed für this purpose.

[jamsy]

anyone is interested I can post an example

Please do

thanks

[weesnich]

# badbots - if you want to block clients by UA
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent extractor ban
# example: everything with extractor in it shall be banned
# ... insert more bad UAs here if you want ...
# see i.E. [webmasterworld.com...]

#general (for any files not specified below)
<Files ~ "^.*$">
order allow,deny
allow from all
Deny from ^64\.156\.198\.(7[4-8]¦80)$
# Example: Deny a websense IP-block, more can be added here
deny from env=ban
</Files>

#images
<Files ~ "\.(gif¦jpe?g¦png)$">
ErrorDocument 403 [mydomain.tld...]
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ^http\:\/\/.* noimg
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ^http\:\/\/(www\.){0,1}mydomain\.tld.*!noimg
# REMARK: there should be a [space] between "*" and "!", but the forum-software always deletes it
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ^http\:\/\/(www\.){0,1}otheralloweddomain\.tld.*!noimg
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer SetEnvIfNoCase Referer google\..*!noimg
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI noimg.gif!noimg
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from env=noimg
Deny from env=ban
Allow from all
</Files>

#everybody shall be able to read robots.txt or other .txt
<Files ~ "\.(txt)$">
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>

Please always add a [space] before "!noimg", the forum removes them without my consent :-)

This example displays noimg.gif for every hotlinked image with wrong referrers. Allowed are mydomain.tld, otheralloweddomain.tld and everything with "google." inside (I wanted to keep goolge-imagesearch functional).
If the client blocks referrers or submits nonsense messages like "blocked by stupid software" the normal images are displayed. I see no solution to distinguish between "good" and "bad" in such cases. You might as well block those, but then visitors with blocked referrers never see correct images from your site.

My noimg.gif is a big (800x600) GIF asking not to hotlink my images and giving contact information. This does not completely prevent hotlinking, als many people search for images on google, and post them in forums or guestbooks not knowing that the image will not be displayed properly. But it makes it unattractive for websites - usually the hotlink is removed if the autor sees the result.
I think its not possible to send a webpage instead of the error-image, the usual browsers than display nothing or the broken-image-icon.

It can reduce bandwith consumption. The gif is smaller than normal fotos or other grafics and compresses well with only a few colors.

Testing is possible using Mozilla + refspoof-addon + UABar-addon (see mozdev.org)

It works well on my site for about half a year now. In my view it decreased bandwith-loss for me.

[jamsy]

thanks very much for that weesnich ;)

i presume it goes in a .htaccess file (sorry for lame question)

[weesnich]

Yes; sorry for not mentioning it. If you set it up surf your site for a while and watch out for 500-Errors. If there are any, you are in trouble :-)
The easiest thing is to restore your previous .htaccess (have a backup for this purpose) and than take time to find the problem.

It should be possible to test your new .htaccess in an unimportant directory of your site first if a short breakdown of your site hits you very hard.