It seems to be a pretty common internet phenomenon - people get mad when you directly link to an image that they’re hosting on their webpage. Many more popular webhosting companies even have things that automatically redirect any attemps to do this to basic graphics that say “Geocities - Direct linking prohibited” or “This image hosted by Tripod!” or whatever.
It seems to be that the main reason this bothers people is that you’re “stealing their bandwidth” or costing their website to uh…do extra work or something (I don’t really understand how this stuff works).
So how does it work, and why does this bother people? If I put a link on my blog to a picture that somebody else is hosting, what does it “drain” from them? Does it do this draining all the time, or only when someone is actually viewing my blog?
Every time the image is downloaded, it makes the server hosting it do work, and uses that server’s outgoing bandwidth. Website owners have to pay for bandwidth – it isn’t free – and the more data they send, the higher their bill. Thus its reasonable to expect that people downloading your images are doing so while using your website, not some other person’s. For this reason, embedding images hosted elsewhere is considered rude.
First things first: generally, if you want to put up a website, you need to go through some kind of web-hosting service. These companies don’t like to have to send out too much data; after all, if too many people are downloading stuff from their computers, there’ll get to be a backlog of requests and the speed at which data can be retrieved from their machines will take a nose-dive. To avoid this, these companies generally charge their users for bandwidth: the more people download from your website, the more you have to pay your web-hosting service.
Now: there are two possible situations here, hot-linking and what I’ll call “hot-embedding” for lack of a better term. Hot-embedding is when you take the URL for the image in question and put it in the HTML code for your own site. In this case, whenever somebody loads your site, their browser will also download the image from the original site. In other words, every time John Q. Internet looks at your page, the owners of the original site have to use some bandwidth to send their picture to John. This is almost universally frowned upon, since (a) it’s an underhanded way of getting other people to pay for bandwidth costs that you should really be taking on yourself, and (b) if you’ve got ads running on your site, it could be argued that you’re profiting off of them; after all, people might come to your site to view their image, and then decide to click on one of your ad links.
Hot-linking is when you post a link to a JPG file or some such on your website, and isn’t as directly harmful to the person you link to. However, the owners of the original website will often want to control how their image is viewed in a browser, either because they have some aesthetic intent in how the image is presented on their own page, or (more commonly) because they want people to come to their own site and perhaps look at the ads that happen to be on the same page as the image.
Whether either practice is ethical is probably left to GD. Hope this helps!
Years ago, I made a funny little .gif animation. It was about 200k. It was hosted on a webpage I had that had very little traffic. Well, it caught someone’s eye, and it ended up being hotlinked to by several people on several different Fark threads – it was also hotlinked to on two different “FREE BUTTONS, IMAGES AND WAVS!” sites.
Serving up that one image to thousands of people (most of whom would never have any idea about my little webpage’s existence or connection to the image) ran through my allotted bandwidth pretty damned quick – and since I wasn’t keeping an eye on my server stats, kept running into overage – so I payed more than three times my monthly fee to settle the bill that month.
People generally have better hosting deals these days, but I was out of pocket over a hundred bucks. That’s generally why people get pissed at hotlinkers.
My organization has lots of photos of children on our web site and we had to send a polite but firm letter to a woman who was “hot embedding” the photos into her own blog.
We had purchased limited rights to those photos. Those rights do not include allowing other people to use the photos without paying the photographer.
While auditing the site usage, we discovered that the linking was artificially inflating the amount of traffic to our site. Artificially inflating numbers is frowned upon by the foundations and donors who fund our non-profit organization. It can be hard to convince someone that you didn’t have anything to do with an error that works in your favor.
As a poor little organization with a poor little site, we were having bandwidth issues, and really didn’t want somone to suck away 1 or 2 megs (I forget the exact amount) of our bandwidth allotment each month.
Not only were our photos being linked into a blog, it was a blog in an entirely different language. We didn’t know what it said (we think it was Farsi) – it could have been posting anything from ads for baby clothes to death-to-America statements using our adorable little children as models. Even if we had unlimited rights to the photos, we’d want some say in how they’re used.
Besides what’s already been said: it’s not your image to use. The website in question made that image/picture/animation (or bought it) for use on their web site, not yours. It’s basically plagiarism - presenting their work as your own.
If you are the person who owns the original picture and web site, is there a way to prevent people from linking to it, other than making a request to your ISP?
Here on the Dope, posters occasionally link to a photo to illustrate something. For instance, if I link to this photo which is hosted on a site that I do not own; would this be an example of hotlinking and is it frowned upon?
It’s hotlinking, but generally, hot-embedding is what people frown upon. In this case it’s clear that it’s an external link to someone else’s content and it doesn’t drain bandwidth for everyone who loads this page, only those who click on the link. Of course, since it’s someone else’s content, they can always take it down or put a redirect or whatever.
Many people rename the image in question and change their own html code to match. The really mean people do this and also upload the goatse image using the hot-embedded file name.
Thank you iamthewalrus(:3=, I have been wondering about this for some time and was worried that I was committing a major internet faux pax by doing this.
The idiots running the Fuddruckers website (a restaurant chain kinda like TGI Friday, etc.), hotlinked in a big way. On their website they had little flash games, one of which was called Burger Time. Not only did they try to pass it off as their own, without crediting the author/creator, they just embedded the whole thing (hotlinked) in their site.
When the author found out, he polled his blog reader on how to handle it and the winning answer was to change the link on a Friday afternoon (to hope for the longest possible uptime) to a pretty lambasting letter to the webmasters and customers about the dishonest practice along with a ton of popup windows with pictures of a beef slaughterhouse!
Yes, I’m not a web designer so I don’t know how this works, but you can check the http referrer (basically, which website the viewer has just come from) and if it’s anything other than your site you can prevent the image from displaying, or replace it with a much smaller file, or like some people substitute it with a picture of the Goatse man.
Rename your file, and in its place, make a low-quality MSPaint JPEG that says, “Stop stealing my bandwidth”. Most people get the hint.
The goatse suggestion above is considered an extreme example of negative reinforcement. If you want to be completely vile and disgusting about it, I suggest the “Pain” series of images. I will not be giving tips on how to find them.
I have rarely heard of people complaining about hotlinking, as long as the reference is to the main page (as opposed to a specific image in the page). People put up website so other people can look at them; as long as you reference their work appropriately, most people are happy to get extra traffic.
Speaking as a website owner I agree with what already has been said.
Just coincidentally, tonight I discovered someone was hotlinking to an image on my site with NO link to my site and NO reference that it was not his graphic.
I sent an E-Mail to his webhost and I suggested, the culprit cease the hotlinking and put a link to my website. (I know some webmasters get a lot more hostile than that). I have done this before and because everyone is so afraid of lawsuits, the webhosts just ban them outright.
