Boo hoo hoo. I'm sorry I'm 'stingy' because I won't let you steal my copyright!

The BBQ Pit
21

I’d comment on how right-click disabling isn’t going to stop anyone blessed with something called “a brain” who wants to steal your work and your bandwidth, but I think that’s been covered.

I notice there is no link or any easy way to get to your other server, so I have no idea what type of server it is. Have you thought of putting in measures such as such as are discussed here for Apache?

Or, as was suggested in here earlier, just create a website with dynamic pages - use php to create the pages dynamically (like is done with the vBulletin software we are using right now), and they’ll have a bit more trouble getting to them to link.

But once they see the art, it’s theirs. One way or another they will get it.

I notice that you also mention the following:

The comment “I don’t mind if they look” sets off some alarm bells in my mind - this implies, along with the fact that there is no link to your other site from the one in your profile, that you are in fact trying to hide the site. So why not just hide it? Just make it password protected or a secure server and be done with it?

Another thing might be copyright and/or legal notice. Since I can’t find your other site, I have no way of knowing if you have a large link on every page labeled “Using these Photos”, which goes to a page which explains in detail your policy. You know, the way human nature is, a lot of people just assume if you don’t have a notice like that, they are free for use - even if you put the little “Copyright by…” at the bottom of every page. You are going to need a legal terms of use document, especially since your statement here that you allow limited re-creation of the art/photos weakens your legal position unless you have written it down.

This also bothers me:

Well, I have no idea whether or not copyright was “unknown” to Mozart, but the Statute of Anne, which passed into law on 10th April 1710, did introduce the concepts of an author being the owner of copyright, and of a fixed term of protection for published works. Mozart was born 46 years after this, so at least in some countries, copyright was in fact a known concept during his time.

22

ethically speaking,anytime you want to use a picture taken from a site you should ask permission.

How cool is it for someone to spend hours creating a picture to make their site unique, for example, only to have someone else use it on their site?

or imagine, as another example, how Yosemite would feel if some shmoe took her pictures of Yosemite Park and posted them up on a board filled with raging lunacies.

Of course if there is a note saying: use this as you wish (such as in the case of clip art), then it is free to use willy nilly.
that said:
I am not 100% percent sure about this, so I may be wrong:
Unless that fansite is an Official Mr T fan site, they themselves may not have the rights to be posting up the image. This of course does not mean that because they are using it ‘illlegally’ that you can use their images. If I recall correctly, The Simpsons shut down a lot of fan sites.

23

IIRC, yosemitebabe is on an NT host, so the Apache .htaccess methods won’t work. A perl or php solution is probably in order… essentially, you store all of your images in a non-public folder, and have the script in the public area call them to serve to the user. It won’t keep anybody from downloading them, but it’ll at least prevent hotlinking.

24

I think the finest judo-chop delivered to bandwidth thieves was at the hands of the inestimable Dr. Damage over at www.tech-report.com . Some shady online retailer not only stole an entire TR article word for word, but they hotlinked all the images directly from the TR server.

Dr. Damage had something to say about that. Here is what the malefactor’s page looked like until they pulled the article. Don’t miss the now-famous “trained technicians” photo.

25

Isn’t saving the picture and hosting it on your own server much worse than simply linking to it? The first is undeniably copyright infringement, which the second is a gray area (last I checked).

It is bandwidth theft, but that’s not particularly illegal, just not nice.

26

If I gave a link to my other site, (which is a domain site) some of my privacy would be gone. I know that this is a little paranoid, (since most Dopers are good folk) but any whack job who got annoyed by a post I made here could feasably go into whois and look up my domain name - and then they’d know my real name, address, and phone number. That’s why I don’t list any of my domain names here. I don’t care if I sound paranoid, I choose not to risk that.

I want to share it, and obviously don’t mind people seeing my photos. I don’t mind them using the wallpaper, or printing out a random Yosemite photo for a school project, or whatever. I just don’t want them stealing my Yosemite photos and claiming them as their own, or not giving me and my site proper credit. And I certainly don’t want them making any sort of profit off of them (though I’ve not seen that happen to me - yet).

Each page has a detailed paragraph explaining that I own copyright, how you can’t just take the photos, yadda yadda. In this paragraph I link to an even more detailed “terms of use” page. I think I’ve got all bases covered there.

All photographs (except for thumbnails) have my name and copyright, including url (as in © yosemitebabe ). That makes me feel better, but when I see people flagrantly ignoring the detailed explanation I give on EACH page about my copyright, I get pissed. I know I can’t catch everyone who swipes a picture, and I don’t lose sleep over it. I do the best I can (but wouldn’t mind doing better). I just am amazed that some theives will actually act offended and put out when they are caught! Amazing!

As far as the suggestions to use php, etc. - I think I am kind of screwed there. My knowledge of php is limited (but I am trying to learn) and I already have a HUGE amount of photos up, and redesigning the site would be a mammoth job. Hundreds and hundreds of photos I have. It’s one of these Catch-22s: I think the way I have the site designed right now is allowing more people to see it (listing me high on the search engine, more hits, more potential for sales), but I risk more piracy too.

Sofa King: thanks for the link! That’s hilarious, what tech-report did!

27

OK, so your file is called picture.jpg and they’re linking to it…
rename it to picture_new.jpg, change your HTML, and replace picture.jpg with something from www.ratemypoop.com
:slight_smile:
then if they start linking again, do the same thing but with something from goatse.cx until they get the message.
Either that or make a jpg that has “THIS PICTURE WAS ILLEGALY LINKED FROM <your domain>” in it and make that picture.jpg
or learn javascript and only allow the referrer to be from your domain.

28

I’m with Truthseeker. The courts have even weighed in and ruled that linking to content on another site can’t be censored legally. They aren’t doing anything wrong by linking to your photos (unless I’m misunderstanding your problem).

If you really don’t want people to link to your pictures, then don’t post them on the web. That’s like wearing a dress cut all the way down to your belly button then getting pissed that people are looking at your chest.

29

Gar, some short attention spans today.

The issue in question: including someone else’s images on your pages, using someone else’s bandwidth.

Example: A owns copyright on image foo.jpg, which is hosted on A’s server, bar.com. B is an all out theif, and includes the image on their web page. B’s web page is on baz.com, but in their HTML, they write <img src=“http://www.bar.com/foo.jpg”>. This is total IP theivery, and bandwidth piracy.
Now, someone else brought up deep linking.

Example: B has a page, and they like A’s page. They put a link on their page to one of A’s pages, but not the front page. In other words, in B’s HTML, they put <a href=“http://www.bar.com/index4.html”>A neat page</a> rather than a link to the front page, <a href=“http://www.bar.com/index.html”>The front page</a>. This isn’t illegal in any way, but some people don’t like it because they prefer people come in through the front page. This has nothing to do with the OP..

Also, there’s downloading the picture and hosting it. B downloads foo.jpg and uploads it to B’s server, then puts this in their html: <img src=“http://www.baz.com/foo.jpg”>. This is IP theft, is not bandwidth theft, and is really hard to track down.

Finally, someone else used the term ‘image linking’ and now other people are confused.

Example: B has a page, and they like one of A’s pictures. They link directly to it from B’s page. In B’s HTML, it looks like this: <a href=“http://www.bar.com/foo.jpg”>A neat picture, on A’s site</a>. While even less desirable for A, this too isn’t IP theft nor is it bandwidth theft, unless B is obscuring where the picture is, using frames or Javascript, or claim the picture as their own.

This stuff isn’t as complicated as people are trying to make it, people are just using terminology badly.

The bottom line is that if you see an image on a website, and you’d like to use it, ask the owner of the website if you can. Most of the time they’ll OK it if you aren’t trying to make money off it. If you are trying to make money off it, then buy rights. Pretty much anything else is outright theft. There are exceptions, but I don’t want to go through them all…

30

What Wikkit said.

Hell, just linking to the image is kinda rude. It’s much more polite to link to the page that the image is embedded in.

Here’s what anybody who tries to hotlink an image on my server gets:

http://neussubjex.net/nambla.gif

31

yosemitebabe, if you have Photoshop, you might want to just start typing your URL and a copyright notice on the bottom of the images. I’ve noticed that the people which typically don’t understand the concept of not stealing other people’s bandwidth also don’t know how to easily crop or edit images. (To do that, they’ll have to resave it and upload it somewhere anyway, so you aren’t paying to host it for them any more.)

This way, any copies of the image that are distributed will have your URL and copyright notice on them, and if they link to them directly on a message board or e-mail group, it turns into free advertising.

This is pretty much the only good solution I have found, because when you have a lot of images on a static site, it just becomes too much work to go changing the file names all the time. If I get linked to by a certain really heavy-traffic site and it becomes a more costly problem, then I usually either e-mail the poster or administrator of the site and ask them to remove it. Nine times out of ten, they’ll remove it for you.

32

Whoops, sorry…missed that you said you already did that.

33

Let me say that although I am a big advocate of file sharing, unauthorized bandwidth acquisition should be regarded as a form of malicious hacking. Not only it can jam up web site traffic, it has been known to crash some people’s computers visiting the sites.

Yosemitebabe, if you added a watermark to your pictures, with your site name, then in a way you hit managed to hit back by advertising on the offender’s web site without paying him. It may be small consolation for your stolen bandwidth, but it is a start.

To answer Kepi’s question, all websites keep logs on which ip accesses a web page at a certain time, and who is the referring ip. If a peson is surfing, usually she accesses a deep link once or twice. But if an ip is reporting a few hundred referrers from one other ip source, then it is most likely another site accessing the page as <img src> or <iframe>.

34

Exactly! In fact, I was unfamiliar with the term of “deep linking”. Now that I understand what it means, I can say that don’t have any problem with it. Each page of my site has an adequate link menu to the all other sections of my site. I don’t care if someone links directly to “Yosemitepage8.html” since this page has links to my main Yosemite page, all the other sections of the site, etc. etc. Why would I care? I design my site so that people can jump into any page and still be able to grasp what the site is about.

As far as the bandwidth theft goes - several of you have explained it already, but I’ll add my two cents.

The host that has the Yosemite photos has pretty liberal bandwidth allowances, but not all my sites are on hosts who are as generous. I have one host that allows 6 GB of bandwidth a month. This 6 GB is split between several of my sites, and it should be more than enough. But, if I exceed the 6 GB limit, I have to pay more for that month. If I exceed a WHOLE lot more for that month, I pay a WHOLE lot more. I doubt I’ll ever be stuck paying a whole lot more because of unwanted bandwidth theft, but it could happen. It happens all the time to other people. Frankly, I don’t even want to pay even $1.00 a month extra, because of bandwidth theives. Why should I? What do I owe these people? Did they ask me if they could rip me off before they did it?

For this reason alone, I am not very tolerant of bandwidth theives. Their actions have the distinct potential to cost me money. Isn’t it enough that I am generous enough to provide content on the web (at my OWN cost) that (apparently) some people appreciate? Do I have to PAY even MORE to accomodate bandwidth theives too?

However, there are times where someone hotlinks and I don’t mind. I noticed on a message board that someone had hotlinked to some jpgs of my drawings (I also have an art site, with drawing and art tutorials). The hotlinker was answering an art question for another person on the board (it was a 3-D art critique) and they used my drawings to illustrate the point they were trying to make.

But I didn’t mind this sort of hotlinking, because:

  1. it was a message board - not a static web site that would be viewed indefinitely. The thread would die down after a week or so.
  2. The hotlinker specifically gave links to my site, saying “Go see this site, read this page and that page, there are some good tutorials for you here.” This person was promoting my site, so why would I complain over a little hotlinking? In other words, they were giving me credit for the graphics. I have no problem with that.

Yeah, capacitor and jinwicked - having my name and copyright printed on each picture is some comfort. I used to have them digitally watermarked too, but that became to be a hassle. I have SO many photos, and watermarking is not terribly reliable.

Black455 - thanks for showing us the Nambla gif. Can I use it for my hotlinkers? It’s fabulous! :smiley:

35

Yosemitebabe: The only comment I have is off-topic. Very nice page, I might use some of your wallpaper :slight_smile: . But just a teensy, utterly anal nitpick - You list a squirrel photo under “Speckled Ground Squirrel, Yosemite”. Descriptive, but not an accurate common name in this case. What you have there is the California Ground Squirrel, also called the Beechey Ground Squirrel ( Spermophilus beecheyi. Just thought you might want to change the caption.

But feel free to tell me to take my pathetic nitpicks and shove 'em :smiley: .

  • Tamerlane

p.s. - Cocktail trivia for the hard-up :wink: . There are at least two other members of this genus in Yosemite, but they’re not speckled - The Belding Ground Squirrel and the very attractive Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel.

36

I just want to say that this thread has raised my consciousness. I would often link to images on other web pages when I was only planning to have the image up for a brief period. Most of the websites I would link to were big ones, or .edus, but I can’t say for sure that I wasn’t harming anyone by using their bandwidth instead of our own server’s. From now on I will be downloading copies to store on my server.

(I’m always careful about copyrights, and this is non-profit, for-educational-use stuff, and I don’t take images from sites that have restricted use policies, and I always link back to the site of origin, so I think I’m okay there. . . )