Image And Bandwidth Theft

[jdfitch]

Lets start with hotliking to your images. That burns me up, I have actually had to block access to my server from Ebay both U.S. and France. Hotlinking is someone who uses your image hosted on your server and simply puts an image tag to show the image where they want it. They use your bandwidth for thier purposes.

 

I also find it rather rude and also against copyright to copy images from your website and then host them and use them on thier own server.

It is not so bad when they copy the images, at least they are not stealing your bandwidth, but I just discovered a new culprit.

These people are so brazen they did not steal one or two, they stole hundreds, maybe even the entire catalogs worth. I contacted them about it and got this reply:

 

There are several ways that images get posted on our site ranging from

user submissions, and functions of our website that search the internet

for images. We don't have a crawler or robot that scrapes websites for

copyrighted images, but we do use publicly and commercially available

image searching services that are not affiliated with us. From time to

time users post copyrighted images or image searching services provide

copyrighted images to us, and we're happy to work with the copyright

owner to remove these images from our site.

 

Someone please tell me how did their site scour mine for hundreds of images without using a spider or crawler, and to show how deceptive they really are when I check my servers logs I can find three very interesting robotic IPs but no robot identifiers, funny thing is they are in the same IP block as the website and the email server for the new site.

 

I am willing to go on record and accuse www.flippid.com of copywrite infringement

 

The biggest problem now is google images and Froogle, you can not submit to froogle unless you allow them to crawl your images, so you can not block outside access to your images directory and submit to froogle.

 

Just food for thought, I know I have put alot of time and effort into my websites and creating images and artwork for it.

Burns me up when someone uses it without permission. I realize there is going to be a certain amount of this sort of thing on the internet no matter what, but to use almost every image available, even the default ones that make it appear my site is affliated with theirs.

Wonderful.

[Guest]

you should be using a watermark contribution

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1839

 

The biggest problem now is google images and Froogle, you can not submit to froogle unless you allow them to crawl your images, so you can not block outside access to your images directory and submit to froogle.

yes you can, it goes through the thumbnailer. You may have to customize the code if it's to access the images from a hidden folder. But basically you will end up with dynamically generated images having watermarks.

 

This approach can be further enhanced and can resist b/w usage because you could change on the fly the thumbnailer processing file. You can also use cache modules further minimize the b/w usage

[PD_Steve]

Put in hotlinking protection. Allow your site and allow froogle to access it.

 

Add code like this to your .htaccess

 

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://yourdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://google.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://google.com$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.yourdomain.com [R,NC]

 

If you want UK google to access, remember to add google.co.uk as well (and any other google.country site).

 

Now, there is also a way to make it display an image of your choice on the site of anyone directly linking to your images. This is kinda cool because if you want to add something a bit evil you can or alternatively add your banner with your URL all over it. Nothing like a bit of free advertising. Just make the banner small size wise so that your not defeating the purpose. I love doing that, let the thieves come in and have a bit of fun for a few days and then flick it to your banner and check the sites that were stealing and your banner will be all over em all... lol

 

Now, you can go a step further and add a search engine block to your images. This stops your images appearing on google images.

 

This goes into your robots.txt

 

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

 

And thats it. Job done and free advertising :)

[Guest]

And thats it. Job done and free advertising

hotlinking protection? all of this is pointless of course, as the referer field can be manipulated by anyone.

Better start using watermarks and dynamic thumbnails.

[boschg]

Now, there is also a way to make it display an image of your choice on the site of anyone directly linking to your images. This is kinda cool because if you want to add something a bit evil you can or alternatively add your banner with your URL all over it.

 

How can I achieve this?

By changing the last line to something like this?

 

RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/pic_showing_mess...h_you_idiot.jpg [R,NC]

 

Regards