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.
I love doing that. For me, it’s a gallery of coworkers-as-South-Park characters that people remotely link as forum avatars, mostly, and a White Stripes wallpaper that ends up as a thousand teenagers’ LiveJournal background.
I thought about goatse, but decided that the remote linkers might actually find that amusing for the same reason that I did, so these days I rewrite to one of the images in here. They tend to fix the problem quickly.
You’re getting soft, old man.
Personally, I use
RedirectMatch permanent ^.*fuehrerschein.jpg.*$ http://www.borah.schoolreference.com/images/tubgirl.jpg
Always fun to do that; if you’re feeling *really* evil then its fairly trival to create a single colour GIF or PNG which has a size of 5000×5000. The single colour means that it compresses down really nicely and doesn’t hurt your bandwidth. However when a browser views it nasty things happen – quite a few turn it from a nice small file into a 5000×5000 byte block of memory! This either crashes the machine viewing it or makes it really quite slow.
&rw: The biter bit? The image URL you are serving up now redirects to http://sportsplaynow.com/spam110.html.
Me, I’d redirect to a mirror gallery with the same image names (and sizes, so their page layout is unaffected) but of singularly unattractive bird pictures. Vultures at dinner, a dead seagull on the high tide mark, neurotic parrots that have plucked all their own plumage, that sort of thing.
Yes, my time is worthless…
While the MSN gallery may have been discourterous, it is hardly constituted a copyright infringement. It was just a link.
It may have been a copyright infringement because though the pictures were hosted on a site other than the MSN gallery, they were being used as content in the MSN gallery and the heading suggested that the pictures were the gallery owner’s work.