This is my first month here, and I am loving the way people are supporting each other. I am pretty time scarce but I am near the end of my first month, and surviving. My creativity and technical ego are taking a beating :-). Many talented people, on 365 with amazing energy and enthusiasm. Chapeau.
Hotlinking:
My website had a spike in 'visits' this month. I am told this spike in visits, is a result of some person/s 'hotlinking' to the website, to use the images.
Hot linking is when a person uses a link to an image to display it on their own website.
This means the person is:
1) breaching copyright by using your image without approval, and without paying
2) piggybacking on the bandwidth of the site so pointing to a picture on another website so they don't have to store the picture on their own.
This costs the person who uploads the image on their own server money, as someone is using up their bandwidth.
I understand that 365 offers us bandwidth by letting us upload our images here, however, it is possible that the 'hotlinkers' could point to this site, too, as they have done to mine.
I wanted to share this info. for others, learn more as the hot linking started after I joined 365, and I hope there is some internet genius out there who can help?
So folks hotlinked to your site so you are alerting people to that here? Many of us link our pictures on FB or on blogs. If you use the share code it points back to here. Website admins usually can tell and know what is bringing hits into their site. See where visits are coming from and track those things.
you can put a bit of code in the .htaccess file and it helps stop hotlinking, depending on how you have your site set up, you can also put a few lines of code in some of the pages. there is no way it can gurantee a 100% stop - the only way to do that is not put images online, as there are always ways of getting them. one thing to keep in mind is most often the images online are less than 800x600 so there is not a good size for reprinting them.
@aquanimity Never heard of hot linking before! Glad you've tidied up the post, much clearer.
From what I've since read you can bounce some sort of obnoxious message back at the hot link. But how do you find out you've been linked in the first place?
I don't pay bandwidth on my site, but I am about to renew 300+ photos on there so I have my ears pricked up ;)
@cchambers thanks this is useful info. I will get some help w it, @pete21 chris's comment is useful, and thanks the post needed tidying up, will get back to you on how you find out.
@dmortega it's when people use your code and your bandwidth to place a photo from your site onto theres instead of downloading the content and hosting it themselves. http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html
@sdpace --- Good point! What about any place that allows links?
@aquanimity --- This is not a secured sight anymore than Facebook or Flickr. Knowing this, you may need to rethink your use of sites that do not secure the pages which contain your pictures. Which is practicaly everywhere.
@sdpace --- Ok, I see that it's different. You know I've seen the code come up here after pressing something. I don't remember what it was I pressed but a page came up with the code. Hmmm ....
@dmortega i just checked my pinterest board and it is definitelynot hotlinking to original sites when you pin....you can tell by looking at the properties of the image itself, which has been assigned a URL from pinterest. it's not the original file name from the Chase Jarvis website where it came, but if you click on the picture, it takes you to the source. This would not be considered hotlinking. http://pinterest.com/pin/278730664407503577/
@aquanimity so its not from someone pinning one of your photos
@dmortega yes, you can hotlink here with the "img src" html, but most people are using that to link to their own flickr or blog or whatever....i don't think that's abused here. ps. you click "how can i format my reply" to see that code. :)
@dmortega and @sdpace this is great discussion, and I am learning lots. I have to go, but I will be back to read all this tomorrow. Thanks to everyone for their comments, and I will get back with responses. Pumped! Thx.
Oh, I get it! image... /image allows us to link to the image directly. I've seen this allowed on bulletin boards and here. I've actually used it once quite awhile back to show one of my pictures that was posted somewhere else.
I had no idea that it was illegal. These type of things are not common knowledge to the average person who gets onto the internet. There are no common guidelines from one site to another. The responiblity lies at the site where the photos are stored. If this door is open, people will go through. That is true all the time. I bet there are plenty of places where this is allowed.
I don't get though how this effects the copyright because it's still linking to the source. That's not any different than linking to anything else.
@dmortega its because most of the time an image by a person / company is surrounded by all the rest of this text / other images which create a context that this image belongs to this entity. Ie if you create a website with your own images
Now if I create a web site called "toast's photography" and then hotlink one of your images, it makes it appear like mine because it is now no longer in the context of your site.
I think this will be up to how each person designs their web site. If they've put the image as a file, then sure. If the image is stored as a LOB in the database which I dont believe is actually a recommended practice, then there may be code surrounding a HTTP request for it.
@eyebrows or ross or anyone else more knowledgable in web technology answer this one.. i'm a back end and winforms guy
My site is flash-engined, so I don't have that issue. But I also have unlimited bandwidth, so if it did occur it wouldn't cost me anything... I do actually have a folder I use specifically for hotlinking my images to elsewhere on the web.
As for it happening from here, by non-users (or by users other than the submitter or a friend) - I'm sure it happens. Not much can be done for it, without ruining the option for those doing it legally/honestly. That's the nature of the technology. I choose to not lose sleep over it.
Right, so hotlinking is the practice of storing your photos on 1 website and displaying them on another, technically any photo on the Internet can do this (that's how google images works) its not usually a problem unless your photo gets hotlinked from a website with millions of visitors, as yes, it would waste your bandwidth. I'm sure many many photos are hot linked from 365 and that comes with the territory of running a website. The share code on each 365 page essentially allows hot linking, it's really not a problem you have to worry about unless you pay the bandwidth bill on your website.
Now on to the copyright issue, of course anybody using a photo of yours in any way other than those explicitly allowed is copyright theft, whether they are hotlinking it or not.
@toast I like watching people learn how internets works ^_^
Once it's on the internet, it's gone. It's out there. Anyone can do anything with it. "Hot linking", as a phrase, I haven't even seen anyone mention that in at least ten years, so this is pretty amusing.
There's probably some htaccess configuration you could do on your website anyway, @aquanimity , if you're that fussed, to prevent the specific domain that's annoying you with this.
@eyebrows if you needed to, surely you could write a webform page which references a LOB in the database which serves up the image? so you image itself is not able to be referenced directly?
@toast I think it's BLOB, Binary Large OBject... but either way, you could store it in there, but it'd still need to have a URL on which it could be accessed, and thus seen by the rest of the web as just that URL, exactly like the original image would have been as a file in the filesystem. If there's *a* way of accessing it "legitimately", there's a way of accessing it "fraudulently"
@toast I guess, if one was insane, they could write a java applet or some activex object which did the image fetching from the DB, and have an instance of that applet (or flash movie) for every single location on the web page where an image exists, so the flash movie itself displays the image and whilst having its own URL, in some manner, wouldn't expose the file's location... so you've killed hotlinking, but you can never kill that third button in from the right at the top of your keyboard :D
Without reading all of the replies -- you could change the URL of the photo(s) and update your own site to display the new URL instead of the old one that was hotlinked. A pain for you, but it would fix the problem for the time being.
thanks to everyone for their awesome comments, I have downloaded the responses, and forwarded them to my IT helper, I am off into the Gulf of Oman so no 365 for a couple of days, very grateful to you all, best
I know this post is some 7 months old but thought I might link this for you,
hotlinking, inline linking does not break copyright laws. All that happens is your browser redirects to the image host its not stealing the image its caching to the users browser, if they are downloading your image and uploading/selling as print, digital download or storing that image on their server that would be a different matter.
If you dont want to share your images then you would need to take them down.
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I have edited, and hope makes clearer.
Are the 365 links protected?
From what I've since read you can bounce some sort of obnoxious message back at the hot link. But how do you find out you've been linked in the first place?
I don't pay bandwidth on my site, but I am about to renew 300+ photos on there so I have my ears pricked up ;)
@aquanimity --- This is not a secured sight anymore than Facebook or Flickr. Knowing this, you may need to rethink your use of sites that do not secure the pages which contain your pictures. Which is practicaly everywhere.
http://pinterest.com/pin/278730664407503577/
@aquanimity so its not from someone pinning one of your photos
I had no idea that it was illegal. These type of things are not common knowledge to the average person who gets onto the internet. There are no common guidelines from one site to another. The responiblity lies at the site where the photos are stored. If this door is open, people will go through. That is true all the time. I bet there are plenty of places where this is allowed.
I don't get though how this effects the copyright because it's still linking to the source. That's not any different than linking to anything else.
Now if I create a web site called "toast's photography" and then hotlink one of your images, it makes it appear like mine because it is now no longer in the context of your site.
I think this will be up to how each person designs their web site. If they've put the image as a file, then sure. If the image is stored as a LOB in the database which I dont believe is actually a recommended practice, then there may be code surrounding a HTTP request for it.
@eyebrows or ross or anyone else more knowledgable in web technology answer this one.. i'm a back end and winforms guy
As for it happening from here, by non-users (or by users other than the submitter or a friend) - I'm sure it happens. Not much can be done for it, without ruining the option for those doing it legally/honestly. That's the nature of the technology. I choose to not lose sleep over it.
Now on to the copyright issue, of course anybody using a photo of yours in any way other than those explicitly allowed is copyright theft, whether they are hotlinking it or not.
Once it's on the internet, it's gone. It's out there. Anyone can do anything with it. "Hot linking", as a phrase, I haven't even seen anyone mention that in at least ten years, so this is pretty amusing.
There's probably some htaccess configuration you could do on your website anyway, @aquanimity , if you're that fussed, to prevent the specific domain that's annoying you with this.
*unless the klobb from N64 Goldeneye counts?
hotlinking, inline linking does not break copyright laws. All that happens is your browser redirects to the image host its not stealing the image its caching to the users browser, if they are downloading your image and uploading/selling as print, digital download or storing that image on their server that would be a different matter.
If you dont want to share your images then you would need to take them down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc.
This came to me after looking through the post; http://365project.org/discuss/general/13861/what-s-your-favourite