What you will see today if you hot-link my images from Myspace
Today I swatted at one of the gnat-problems buzzing around my personage [definition, see esp. #3] - MySpace users stealing my images to decorate their webpages or chats. Let's be clear: using my copyrighted images without my permission equals theft.
It's a nuisance, a "luxury problem" right now, but I don't particularly want my images in association with a juvenile rant from someone old enough to know better, or, as I saw today, beside someone elses' photo of chocolate Easter bunny genitalia. I have the responsibility to protect my copyright. I also tossed in livejournal.com for good measure, and I can assure you that I will be adding to the banned-from-hotlinking-list.
I'm not a code monkey, so it took a little time and help from on-line forums I found via Google-giver-of-all to figure out how to write the .htaccess instructions. Should you need to solve a similar problem, I present to you the .htaccess code that worked for me. However, PLEASE do not use it to link to my image. After all, that would be theft. And that isn't nice. (But I'll let you serve it for yourself if you ask nicely.)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpe?g)$ http://www.anntorrence.com/at-images/no_myspace.png [NC,R,L]
Comments (1)
The other successful strategy (in addition to blocking hotlinking) is to provide a thumblink gallery with links back to your site.
BTW, a large number of browsers these days don't send HTTP Referrer info these days; so I am not sure if the RewriteCond works for all browsers.
Posted by Kevin Delaney | September 19, 2007 9:38 PM
Posted on September 19, 2007 21:38