Stealing Images

The next one, that follows on from yesterday's expanding thumbnail images, is trawling through Google images and the likes and providing these images.

I did mention about 2 weeks ago the steps a customer is taking to prevent people copying his images, and it's well worth including these steps. Since writing that I've read about people that block the google images bot from their websites, or block all bots from their images folder.

What most customers don't seem to understand (some are harder to get through to than others) is that it simply is not allowed for them to provide a few images taken from other people's sites (one person did have the honesty to pass me the google images link!). If someone has gone to the effort of producing artwork or taking pictures, then they want to use it for themselves and don't want every other competing site copying their images and using them for free.

It's called copyright law! I wouldn't like my hard work being stolen by someone (although it is flattering). If you see an image on a website that you want to use, ask the owner. A bit of flattery and an offer to link back to their site and they might just say yes.

The only step worse is when the designer doesn't even bother to copy the file for themselves and "sponges" from the site the picture is on. I found someone doing that with a small file on one of my sites. It was only 200 pixels across, but they had linked directly to the file. I was alerted to this my someone else who had suffered the same - the offender was a serial offender...

Rather than write to the guilty party I had a bit of fun. I changed the file name on my site and used that in the code instead. Then I created a huge 1000 pixel wide by the same tall image announcing that anyone reading this image was seeing a stolen image and that the site was attempting to steal my bandwith.

Not surprisingly, later that day the person had got a copy of the image for themselves - hopefully having learnt their lesson.