I noticed a bunch of hits directly to pictures in my bird gallery, not going through the gallery interface. And they all had the same referrer string. So I went to the referrer, a MSN group, and was assaulted by the sort of schmaltzy, cornball, overwrought pretention that makes the people on alt.cuddle look sane and well adjusted in contrast. Pictures of fairies and unicorns and that sort of crap. Anyway, somebody put up a page on this group which just leeched my bird pictures, and other people’s as well, and titled it “My Beautiful Birds”.
First of all, they aren’t your beautiful birds, they’re mine. And secondly, didn’t your momma ever teach you about copyright?
So I went into my Apache configuration file, and a quick
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /albums
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://groups.msn.com/<cornball site>.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg) http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/pork.jpg [R,L]
and the picture leechers are going to get a big surprise.