We’ve been having fun with myspace.com this week.   The statistics on our new web host tells us the URL’s which link or refer to our website and a few days ago I noticed that there were some myspace URLs on the list.   I tracked them down and found that four myspace users were pirating images from our site.   What I mean is this; having a web page display an image which is physically located on another site by inserting a direct link to it in the HTML code.   These words you’re reading are on a web page which is located on a web server which belongs to (or is leased by) Lockergnome.   Any images on the page are most probably located in a folder on the same web server but web pages can call images (or other content) from anywhere on the web.   For example, the image below isn’t located on the Lockergnome server, it’s located in a folder named "pni2" on our website.

I pointed the image tag in the HTML to the location of the photo on our site.   The actual HTML code looks like this:

<img src=”http://www.don-guitar.com/pni2/colt003web.jpg” width="200" height="200" border="0">

Because it’s our website and our image, it’s ok for me to do this but if I call an image from another location on the web without permission from the person who owns the image (and/or the website where it’s located) that makes me a pirate who is stealing bandwidth.   It’s ok to link to someone else’s web page but that’s not the same thing.   When you link to someone’s page you’re allowing their content to be displayed in its intended context instead of abusing their bandwidth.

So, I found four individuals who were stealing bandwidth from our site.   Three of them were using our images as backgrounds and the fourth was using a piece of Lisa’s digital artwork as a signature image.   I contacted each of them to let them know I was aware of the bandwidth theft and waited a couple of days.   One of them contacted me and asked for permission to use the image which I gave him happily.   The other three became fair game.   In all three remaining cases I simply renamed the images and edited our web pages (which display the images which were being pirated) to point to the newly renamed image file and then we had some fun with the other three pirates.   The fellow who was using Lisa’s artwork for a signature image is displaying a slightly different image now; it’s just a white field with text that reads "Pirated image removed by owner".   One of the two remaining fellows was linking to a small, dark blue, slightly patterned web tile and that tile image appears unchanged on my web page but the background tile on his myspace page is now a light pink square with a pale blue border and text which reads "don-guitar dot com".   The last fellow was using a skull and crossbones image from one of our personal news pages as a background on his biker, heavy-metal, all black, really-tough-guy page. His new background is hot pink with text reading "I love puppies and kitties and my boyfriend".

Yes, that was really shame-on-me tacky but it was also a lot of fun, we enjoyed a good laugh and we are so ready for the next myspace-cadet who wants to steal bandwidth from us.   Bring it on.

Don Crowder