Google allows image hotlinks to copies on its own domain. Why?

[bumpski]

Well a "script kiddie" must have a typo in his code, or maybe it's intentional. So there's a lot of bad links to one of my sites.
When I research the many domains involved, to build their pages, they have hot-linked to copies of my original images in Google's t0.gstatic.com domain. Obviously for image result rendering performance google is using multiple gstatic.com subdomains (t0,t1,t2,t3) to boost rendering performance by paralleling image requests.

Google should be able to block these hotlinked requests, and in some ways they may be by migrating to a solution using data:image requests. You can see this if you "view source" of one of Google's image results pages.

Hmmm; Is Google facilitating Copyright infringement?

Finally it's amazing how many "domains" can have exactly the same "typo" in their outbound links. They probably really don't want the links to be legitimate, just look like a legitimate typo, for Google's benefit. I hope Google catches onto this quickly.

[aristotle]

I believe that this is what dickbaker referred to in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com ]


I've also seen it in the logs of two of my sites.

[bumpski]

Your absolutely right. The reason for the 404 is the path in the link begins with a single quote and ends with a double quote. This may be intentional, with the hope of fooling Google and maintaining a higher PR for the crappy thief's sites.

So what do you do? (Don't quote me on this, but) I give Google tacit approval to copy my images, BUT, I do not approve of Google facilitating Copyright infringement. I really don't want to hear the "noindex" argument.

Google knows all their own IP's and could easily block the hot-linking and still maintain the image results performance.