Image scrapers?

1000's of stolen images with just text links

[ALbino]

While reading the Google Images update thread I noticed that there was a site that had our images. I clicked on the page, and all it is is a spammy scraper page with some paid for links, followed by a lot of white space, and then a few hundred direct text links with the image filename to the images. They're not loaded on the page, just linked to.

On top of which, the images that are taken from our site are shrunk down and compressed, probably to limit the amount of bandwidth while still looking legitimate on Google Images. Has anybody ever seen anything like this before? And how would you report it because the images are different (size/resolution/etc) but obviously the same image. Thoughts?

[StickyNote]

Is the site hotlinking the images from your site?

[jomaxx]

Sounds like they're not embedding the images on their page, simply HREF linking to them. To my mind this is kind of a grey area.

I can see why you'd be ticked off; Google Images frequently sends users to an external page instead of the original site's page, and that's apparently what the site in question is optimizing for.

However as someone who sets up links for the benefit of the end user, sometimes I find myself having to link directly to an image because there is no acceptable alternative. Therefore I don't really feel it's always wrong to do that. I am simply NOT going to give give people instructions like "click here, then scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page, then click 'large image'". If a site isn't set up competently, I'll just link to the image directly.

[ALbino]

The images aren't linked to my site, they've saved the images on their server, but resized/recompressed them. They're the same picture, just a smaller version. From the Google Images perspective you can't see any difference because G only gives thumbnails anyway, and thumbnails of two pictures that have different original resolutions look identical in the image SERPs.

Imagine I have a picture of the Eiffel Tower with me standing in front of it on my site at a resolution of 600x400. Now they've taken that picture and put it on their server with a resolution of 300x200 with a text link that says ALbinoEifflerTower.jpg. It's still me standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, but with Google Image's 100x100 thumbnails they look identical.

[edited by: ALbino at 7:30 am (utc) on Jan. 25, 2007]

[Woz]

Assuming that the original images in question belong to you (or your client) and are therefor copyright yourself (or your client), then if they are taking said images from your site without your permission and are using them for their own gain without your permission, it is my opinion that, in broad terms, they are in breach of copyright. However, depending on what they are actually doing, "fair play" criteria may come into play. More betterer experts in copyright law than I may be able to offer a more qualified opinion.

Necessary Disclaimer:- I are not a lawyer, the above should be taken with a pound of salt and should definitely not be considered legal advice. :)

[jomaxx]

I didn't realize they'd actually taken your images and put them on their own site. If so, I'm inclined to agree with Woz.

P.S. I'm not so sure that third-party-linking trick I described works any more anyways. It may have been fixed. I just looked at a bunch of random images and couldn't find any case where it occurs, whereas it used to be quite common.

[jetteroheller]

I check regular my referer log files and implement
hot link protection on domain base.

Some website owners see instead of the hot linked picture
a picture about copyright and bandwidth costs.

[ALbino]

The pictures aren't hotlinked, lets be clear on that. Also, while it's probably technically a copyright violation, I'm not sure going after them legally is the important part so much as getting them out of the SERPs.

Really though, I posted this thread to warn other people that there is such a thing out there and they should be on the lookout for it.

[thecoalman]

I they simply scraped your images and are presenting them as their own then I'd suggest that's infringement. If you can't get any satisfaction from the owner I'd suggest contacting the host. If it's a legitimate host you should get some pretty fast action, I've had text content scraped twice and both times the host suspended the site almost immediately. Perhaps I was lucky...

Some website owners see instead of the hot linked picture
a picture about copyright and bandwidth costs.

You are too kind. A lot of the hot linkers I get are from myspace, forums etc. I use a 32000px X 1px transparent .gif, limited to this size because it's as high as my image editor would go. Generally the images size is not specified in the html... :) Most probably have no clue what happened or that it happened since they have the image cached locally.