Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I’d posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone’s linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.
Now on the one hand, that’s kind of cool—but on the other hand, I’m a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can’t access without registering first, which means I can’t just go and see what they’re doing with the Oobi image they’re pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I’d have to pay them additional money to find out why.
And before someone points out to me that it’s only like 5 bucks to register and I’m therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK‘s Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:
Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.
So if they won’t let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It’s the principal of the thing.
Grumble… It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules…
Comments
4 responses to “Farking Irritating”
I’ve had that happen to me. Sometimes my images get linked on some useless discussion board where someone says "find me a lighthouse."
And I’ve run into referrer links that go to sites I can’t access. Even if the signup is free, I don’t want to bother.
A garden site I work for had a ton of their plant images linked on some weblog in Iran or that region. I had to come up with an Apache rewrite rule for it. I’d copy it here but I deleted it a while back. Basically you check the ‘referer’ and serve up a different image, or an error.
The worst instance, I think, was a couple years ago when someone spotted a rare bird in Florida. I had an image of the bird from Costa Rica on my site. A certain unnamed Florida news site took it upon themselves to link directly to my image from their page. No credit, and they didn’t respond to my email. I ended up editing the image to put my name and copyright on it. I could’ve used the Apache rewrite rule here too if I’d known about it at the time.
Or another option is to rename the image, and/or place in a goatse 😉
I had the same problem for a while there, and had to put in some apache redirect rules that redirected folks to an image with this URL on it:
http://www.utterlyboring.com/block
Basically, it’s a blog entry that tells why I started doing it. It’s not so much an issue now that things have simmered down, and I’m considering removing the block (now that I have a photoshop action that puts my URL on all the images I post), but for a while there it was a bandwidth nightmare.
I’ve had the images on the discussion boards before… actually, I’m getting a whole bunch of hits from 2 right now, someone’s linking to an image in their sig, I think. I didn’t grouse about this because I wasn’t really bothered by it: I can easily (freely) see what they’re using the image for. I may have to disable that stuff, though, it’s starting to get significant.
Yeah, I might rename the image. Might be more fun to screw with the original… though I *will not* put up goatse… 🙂 … but maybe something else not quite so vile…
I guess because I have flexible server access I just don’t see why people feel the need to link to an image on someone else’s site–especially without permission. But even on the various free hosting stuff I’ve played with in the past, it’s fairly easy to manage your own images and stuff… *sigh* I’m getting too old for this shit 😉