Elementary, my dear Watson
p. Well, I’ve been quite the detective today. I noticed, when having a periodic check of my site statistics, that my biggest referrer (by a long way) was a “Navy Wives bulletin board (Navy Wives - not p0rn despite what it sounds like)”:http://www.navywives.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi - somewhat of a surprise, to say the least. I couldn’t see any obvious links to my site on this page, but after a bit of digging in my recent visitors log, I found out what was happening.
p. Someone signing herself as ‘Susie’ had used one of the images in “wings open wide (Oxford sunset)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/wingsopenwide/archives/000085.html#000085 in her signature on the board. Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m flattered that anyone likes the image enough to bother to use it — but there are two things about this whole business that have really hacked me off. First, all of the works in wings open wide are covered by a “Creative Commons Licence”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0 which clearly states that people are welcome to copy, distribute or display the work, but only if they give the original author credit, which Susie certainly didn’t do. Since the Creative Commons Licence is very generous in what it allows a licensee to do, I think it’s downright rude to violate it, not to mention illegal. Second, Susie didn’t even copy the image to a local drive (which is why all the referrals were showing up). So, not only did she use it without attribution, but she’s also stealing my bandwidth.
p. Unfortunately, Susie doesn’t list her email address on the board, nor could I email the administrators of the board without registering on it. So as a temporary measure, I’ve changed the URL of the image — so that her sig will break — and put a message to Susie on wings open wide in the hope that she might visit to find out what’s going on. Grrrr.
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Oh, before getting annoyed its probably worth remembering that most people have never heard of the license you mention, and that most people have no concept of 'stealing bandwidth'. It's quite probable she does not realize she is causing a problem.
by dave murphy @ 02/03/2003 12:03 am • Permalink •
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Usually one puts up an offensive image under the old URL :-]----- ISTr there is a setting you can out on your server that prevents images being used in that way, but I can't remember what it is :(
by dave murphy @ 02/03/2003 12:03 am • Permalink •
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Stick something like this in a .htaccess file in your images directory and it will stop others from stealing your images/bandwidth. It will only allow images to be refered to from your domain.
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPREFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTPREFERER}!^http://YOURSITE.COM/.$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^"]http://WWW.YOURSITE.COM/.$[NC] ReWriteRule .*.(gif|jpg)$ - [N,F,L]
Credit to http://www.scriptygoddess.com/
by Nick @ 02/03/2003 10:04 am • Permalink •
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Thanks for all the suggestions, folks!
Georg: evil but tempting suggestion. Dave: your points are well taken and quite probably true. However, I'd be amazed if she didn't visit wings open wide when she found out that her sig picture had vanished (so she must have seen my message), but she clearly hasn't learnt her lesson (see Ollie's second comment). Nick: excellent suggestion - I'll give it a try when I get a minute. Scriptygoddess.com is a mine of useful info isn't it? Ollie: I did consider putting up this kind of image, but 1) I wanted to just get something sorted out quickly, and 2) I'm lazy. Susie doesn't seem to get it...
by bsag @ 02/03/2003 8:03 pm • Permalink •
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I like Georg's idea - but a refinement would be to replace the image located at the URL, with a simple image, containing some text informing the user to please either use the image locally, with a credit, or not use it at all.
Or, maybe a refinement of Nick's htaccess lines so that any attempted access image on your website, that isn't refered (sic) by pages on your website, gets replaced by Apache serving a default 'Please don't link directly to images' image? I'm afraid I don't know the code for this but it definitly can be done.
by Ollie @ 02/03/2003 8:03 pm • Permalink •
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I see 'Susie' has now deep-linked to another image on another website. The bottom of said website (www.alloftheabove.net/cahr/) says: [These pages may not be copied in whole or in part without the express written permission of...]
by Ollie @ 02/03/2003 8:03 pm • Permalink •
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I have built up a whole collection of rules like Nick's in my Apache config - the nice thing about them is you can usually make very specific exceptions to your sites behaviour.
I have a 20Mb download that will be replaced with an extra nagging page but only when it's linked from the one site that deep-links it. Bt using SSI as well, I have a couple of paragraphs of text that appear on my music page, but only if you found it by searching google for 'xyz download'... lots of fun!
by Howie @ 06/03/2003 10:04 pm • Permalink •
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