Posted: Mon 18 December 2006

Stealing Images

As a designer, it's never nice to see another website ripping off images you have created. Unfortunately, there's very little you can do about it, other than send an email to the offending website and hope they have the good grace to remove the image.

This happened with one of our sites recently. The site on the left contains the original banner image, the site on the right is using the same banner image;

In this instance the offending website has hot-linked to the original image - the image on their site is loaded from the original on our server.

This method of stealing images is particularly galling for the victim as not only is their work being plagiarised, but their server is handling requests from the offending website for the image, thereby increasing the load on their server.

However, if someone is foolish enough to hot-link, there is something you can do about it. And we did. Simply replace the image they are linking to with something they certainly wouldn't want on their website.

If we were being particularly vindictive, we could have replaced the image with pornographic material, or something equally unpleasant. As it was, we simply put a link to our own website;

Hopefully, the offending website will learn their lesson... in the meantime, until they notice the banner has been replaced, we're getting free advertising.

I wonder how long it will take them to spot it... it's been there for almost an hour now...

By: Simon
http://www.eazytiger.net
Web design and ecommerce Leicester

• « back to articles