Is it ethical to link another site

Curt said:

This is easy to solve. Read the book; "The Fountain Head".

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So you think Jorge should blow up the website at which his hotlinked photo appeared!!!!

(you have to have read the book)

Ole said:

Calm down please, folks - or this thread will follow the LFforum.info-thread into oblivion.

Or maybe it should do that anyway?

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Well, for the most part this thread is a string of complaints about a problem that can't be fixed. Venting, in a word. Perhaps its useful.

Mongo said:

The best defense to hotlinking is to replace the hotlinked image with something that makes the hotlinker look like an idiot.

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This very exact thing happnes to me all the time. When I find the link I initially will send a polite e-mail requesting the infringer to cease-and-desist. If I recieve no action I'll send an e-mail to the web-site admin. No action still? I take matters into my own hands...much as Mongo has mentioned.

You can read about my last episode here:

http://www.pirate4x4.com/forum/showthread.php?t=397893&highlight=copyright

Usually I don't have to go this far.

Copyright is a very tender issue for me. I just spent the last 2 1/2 years of my life and upwards of $15,000 defending it against a company who was using an image of mine illegally. The case settled before we went to court, and I won.

Exchanging the photo doesn't solve the problem of stolen bandwidth - the new photo will probably use as much bandwidth as the replaced, hot-linked photo. If the hotlink causes you to exceed your allowed bandwidth, as was the case with my site, you'll still exceed bandwidth.

My new host has a feature that prevents hotlinking, so I have taken advantage of that. Looking in stats, I can still see the hotlinks, but they are no longer using my bandwidth.
juan

juan said:

Exchanging the photo doesn't solve the problem of stolen bandwidth...

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It can lessen the problem if you make the right image...something like "I hotlinked someone elses image and now they replaced it with this message...aren't I a moron?" at 100x100 in simple black text on a white background can get down to around 1K as a very low quality JPG, and will still make the hotlinker look like a jerk. Of course, you can also just rename the image file so that all of his pictures show up as broken links.

I know it's best just to set things up so that people can't hotlink...but I love the idea of screwing around with someone whom I'd consider a thief just based on his or her actions. Sometimes I'm just too cynical...

Mongo said:

I know it's best just to set things up so that people can't hotlink...but I love the idea of screwing around with someone whom I'd consider a thief just based on his or her actions.

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That was the most rewarding part for me also.

What's a "hotlink?"

Bill Mitchell said:

What's a "hotlink?"

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showing an image on one site that is actually posted in another site. For example this image is not in APUG, you are seeing a picture that is stored in my picture hosting site.

Mongo said:

The best defense to hotlinking is to replace the hotlinked image with something that makes the hotlinker look like an idiot.

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Yes, obviously not an option in this case, but during the last election a farily welll known right wing blog hotlinked to a photo a colleague had of a particular politician (can't even remeber who now). He emailed them and asked them to remove it, but they just brushed him off. So he replaced the image with a goth/bondage one - came down pretty quickly after that....

tim said:

So he replaced the image with a goth/bondage one - came down pretty quickly after that....

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What the 'net really needs is a page that collects all of these pranks in one place. You can find them out there if you look through a lot of humor sites, but there's no "look who got screwed by hotlinking" site anywhere on teh 'net (at least not that I'm aware of). Now that would be a hoot!