I make an effort to share my work as fairly as I can. Everything I create on this or any other site is licensed under Creative Commons in such a way that it allows anyone to download and use stuff however they want, providing they give me proper credit for the work I’ve done (i.e. a link back to my site if they use my work on their own site). I don’t mind people taking my images outright and putting them up on their own servers, as long as that credit link is there.
What I’m not prepared to do, however, is pay for the bandwidth to allow people to hotlink to my images. It’s not like I’m preventing anyone from copying the image and using their copy locally— just steal it properly and put it up on your own server, it’s not that hard! I’ve been lazy about letting hotlinkers get away with it, because I hate blocking my site’s content from people who want to see it. But the hotlinking from one particular site finally got to me this morning, because the guy is using my images to advertise his own stuff, and making it seem like he took the pictures himself. As far as I can tell there is no mention of my site or credit for the photos anywhere on his site. So I decided to do something about it.
I’m usually not a fan of htaccess rewrites, just because you always run the risk that your security measures will block things you don’t want to block (feedreaders, for example). So for the moment I’ve only blocked that one particular domain from accessing my images, and this morning he’s going to find that his hotlinked images are replaced with this:
I was really, really tempted to use the goatse picture instead, but in the end the self-promoter in me won over.
If the hotlinking becomes a more widespread problem and I’m manually having to block several domains per day, or I find that the majority of the hotlinkers have their hearts in the right place (i.e. they’re giving proper credit but still hotlinking my images because they just don’t know how to upload a local copy), I might change the htaccess to place a watermarked advertisement on the images rather than replacing them altogether.
Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this here is because I’m paranoid that by messing around with the htaccess I may have broken my site for some innocent readers, and I’d appreciate a comment here if that’s the case. Obviously pictures are a big part of what makes this site work, so you should be able to see them if you want to. Sure, it’s fun to burn hotlinkers, but not at the expense of legitimate traffic. You guys are much more important to me than vengeance.
Also, if anyone has a more elegant solution that would work in the long term (I admit my quick fix this morning is short-sighted), please do suggest it. I’m open to anything.