Redirects for images linked to sites

[Employment Law Clinic]

Hi all,

I found a website tonight that had an image being directly hosted from my site. www.personal brandingblog.com/10-personal-branding-predictions-for-2010/ has an image that was at employmentlawclinic.com/ Images /Employment Contract.jpg (not for the shy eyes). I've now moved the original image (to http://employmentlawclinic.com/Images/Employment Contract1.jpg), but felt it was rude that this person - a branding expert - was using an image hosted on my site.

I've now set up a redirect for the site's image, but was wondering if this would have any negative impact on Employment Law Clinic.

Any thoughts?


Karl Limpert

 

[iwgraphics]

Personally, I would have contacted them and asked them to stop linking to your copyrighted content, rather than moving/re-directing your images.

If you have a good web statistics report, you can find out which pages/files are being accessed on your site and the referrer, so you can pick up instances like that easier.

The other option is to watermark your images with your URL or exclusive business name. That way, even if they link to them, your watermark will show.

 

[DavidGiant]

In future I would recommend another solution. If you are running apache as your server you can create a .htaccess file to prevent access from a certain site. This would allow you stop a site linking to your files.

You could probably raise this with your hosting company, they wouldn't want this either as this is generating additional load on their servers so would probably do the above for you.

The problem here is that they haven't copied your image to their server, you contact the website telling them that they cannot republish your digital property, you can even contact their host directly. How effective this will be will depend on the site proprietor and the location of the webhost and the laws they are bound by.

 

[dal]

it's called hot-linking and it is considered theft as they are stealing your bandwith.

 

[Employment Law Clinic]

Thanks all for your comments.

I have written to the Dan guy (took some effort to find an email address, and also sent comments to the blog, and a Twitter to him; I tried to make contact both before & after I changed the image (again now)), but no response so far. It's clear many of the images on the site are "hot-linked" (parlance I wouldn't know but for dal - thanks dal), and given the comments in part 1 of the article, he should know better.

I was most annoyed to find this happening, so feel he's brought it all on himself and will make no apologies for my response.

If he doesn't deal with it promptly, I will contact my host, but generally I don't want to have to mess around with the images (watermark these, etc) or anything else on my site just to prevent these parasites.


(David, the server runs on Windows - got bad advice when I signed up - but clearly I should switch to Apache, given the much wider advice available on this, so will probably change it one day soon. Will no doubt be looking for loads of advice when I do that...)


Karl Limpert