Like many of us, my friend Dave has a number of photos on his web site. Recently he started to see a large number of requests for this photo.
On further investigation he discovered that this forum was using it as a background image. Without asking permission and without taking the obvious step of taking a copy and hosting it on their server. This means that everytime someone visits that page, his server gets an unnecessary hit.
He retaliated by changing that image. If they’ve fixed it before you read this, he’s put a snapshot here. And his (very polite) comment on the forum is here.
Remember boys and girls, just because something is out there on the internet, that doesn’t mean you have the automatic right to steal it.
I wish my situation were as easily fixable; when I had a look at why my server logs suddenly started being quite a bit bigger than in previous months, I found that there’s a picture of mine that lots of people are using as their avatar on various online boards. (It doesn’t help that it’s the #2 hit on a Google Images search for ‘avatar’.)Even after some fiddling with RewriteEngine and redirecting requests not containing LiveJournal or Google to another image, I still get requests for it. Apparently, people don’t care that their avatar says “I’m a bandwidth thief”. And writing to every single BBS that uses the picture would be quite a bit of work.As such, I sympathise.
So up the stakes to make it say something like “I fuck small children and sell the pictures”, or replace it with an animated gif of some hot girl-on-dog action. Which you can no doubt find in your daily spam feed.
Hm, food for thought.