Can I start charging a free host?

copyright theft and bandwidth using

[simonuk]

Here is the situation:

I own a site which has free desktops that people can download which promotes the area I live in. I have the legal notice on every page on the site explaining they are for desktop wallpapers only.

I expect (and do have) some copyright infringement but the scale of it from 1 free host is beyond a joke.

Every single day I have to email them with multiple new sites that are linking directly to my images. There are so many people using my images from this host my bandwidth costs are going through the roof.

It takes them 72 hours to remove my image by which time another stack of sites are then waiting to be removed.

This host service isn't a well known one but they are the only one I am having problems with.

Is there anything I can do to try and regain the huge amount I'm losing each month while they remove the images?

Simon.

[bcc1234]

Use mod_rewrite to switch images based on referrer to something that displays your sales pitch.

[simonuk]

Can you do this for an entire domain and not just 1 of the host sites?

For example the hosts url is:

http://www.example.com/home.aspx?user=widget

Simon.

[edited by: engine at 10:44 am (utc) on April 2, 2004]

[simonuk]

Scrap that, I figured it out already.

Thank you sooooo much for this! I have a nice 5k gif letting them know what I think of them :)

Simon.

[twist]

The funniest one I ever saw was a guy gave them a image with a website address to an adult site. It said something like this,

"Please view my other website at www.example.com"

[edited by: engine at 10:43 am (utc) on April 2, 2004]