Adventures in Hotlinking: Part 1

Hotlinking according to altlab is:

Not a day goes by without me checking to see if someone is hotlinking to files owned by Short Consulting clients or myself. I’d like to share some of the cases of hotlinking I’ve had to deal with in the past year.

Adventures in Hotlinking will be an ongoing series of articles about my experiences in dealing with bandwidth theft.

Jonathan Jackson Photography Copyright Violations

Jonathan Jackson Photography carries hundreds of images that are actually products for sale. The images are watermarked but I still have to worry about hotlinking. This web log took it upon themselves to hotlink to one of Jonathan Jackson’s photographs. I noticed it and blocked the specific instance using a .htaccess file.

That worked for a while but then the individual running the blog decided to just upload the image to his site which is a serious copyright violation.

It gets better; the entire site is in Dutch. I know very little about the Dutch language and I couldn’t track down a way to contact the blog owner. I decided to contact the Dutch firm hosting his site. A few days past and Jonathan Jackson was contacted by the hosting firm. The owner of the blog and Jonathan Jackson worked out a deal giving Jonathan the appropriate credit for his work.