Comments on: Protecting Your Web Site Images

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:31:48 +0000

I pretty routinely use images from other people’s blogs & websites on my blog. If there’s an image I want to use and it isn’t downloadable or linkable, I usually just take a screenshot of it.

I can understand being miffed at your image being used if another person explicitly takes credit for it. But I’m less certain how it harms you if someone uses in it such a way that they aren’t claiming authorship (and in fact are linking back to your site).

Presumably it isn’t hurting you financially since you aren’t selling the image. Perhaps you wish the image to be unique to your site, but that’s really a pretty abstract idea since it’s probably pretty rare that someone who visits your site also happens to visit the site of the person who is using your image. Those who do visit both sites are probably doing so because they’re following the image’s link (so that the person borrowing the image is actually promoting your site).

By: Mark Baker

Mark Baker — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:53:43 +0000

Kit - see http://www.tineye.com

By: kit oates

kit oates — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:25:57 +0000

I dont watermark my images because it spoils the image, but i can understand why people might. What would be great is if there was a way to locate your images on the web, then you could take the appropriate legal action…

By: cilt bakimi

cilt bakimi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:59:56 +0000

I had success with watermarking images…

By: igreenspot

igreenspot — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:01:53 +0000

I don’t mind people stealing my images, but bandwidth theft is another thing, they use our bandwidth display our picture and take credit for that, I can’t tolerate that. I too, updated my .htaccess to prevent this, you should try this too.

By: daily digital

daily digital — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:49:13 +0000

Hi, I also get angry with the hot link images but now I can make my image is not steal anymore by redirect it into my image which is said “you steal my image from yourdomain.com” :D

it’s really fun when I can do it and see the result. I need to change the .htaccess file and you can generate it from http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/

try it and I hope you like my method :D

By: Nail Fungus

Nail Fungus — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:53:53 +0000

I had success with watermarking images…I think that is the way to go….especially if the watermark standsout….or you can you use your url in the watermark and get some traffic out of the deal

By: Miami Dade Personal Injury Lawyer

Miami Dade Personal Injury Lawyer — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:25:12 +0000

Thanks for raising an important copyright issue.
Unfortunately, it very difficult to protect web audio/video from those who wish to steal it and use it for their own profit.

However, I noticed that Adobe Flash makes it harder to copy images and video off the web.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:31:46 +0000

Wow i hadn’t even thought about that. Thanks for raising the awareness.

By: Nathan Selikoff

Nathan Selikoff — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:15:01 +0000

Thanks for the article! I hope you hear a response from the blog writer soon. If bandwidth theft really becomes a problem and you have a web host that allows you to edit your .htaccess files and comes with mod_rewrite enabled in apache, you can explicitly prevent this type of linking to your images. Do a Google search for “mod_rewrite prevent off-site linking to images” or take a look at a tutorial like this one: http://bignosebird.com/apache/a13.shtml