Dealing With Hot-Linking And Article Theft

Haven't posted an entry in a few days , I wrote some articles instead and added some more content. While going through the logs I noticed some requests for just my images. Aww crap - someone was hot-linking to my images.

Wikipedia's definition -  for those of you who don't know

In-line linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located.

Ok I tried to be polite and sent a PM, I asked for them to change the links. The "Author" refused. I posted a comment below the article

You know I really don't mind you linking to my site, or even creating a teaser and pointing people in the right direction, but you just copied and pasted the whole article and hot-linked to my images.
You even had to put part of the article into a comment to make it fit.
That's pretty rude.
My site is a small one that provides a community service as well as the articles you read. Things like this make it harder for sites like mine to survive.

I changed the images.... no I didn't substitute the images with porn , tub-girl or goatse.cx, but I really wanted to .

WARNING : if you don't know what those last two are don't search for them on google, you can not "unsee" things.

I swapped two of the three images being leeched. I replaced them with pictures that explained the article was stolen and that the images were being leached. These pictures.

The third image I left alone as it is connected to a product listing and would have an effect on the other links.

The next day I found that the blog owner had visited my site, found the images and re-linked to the articles original images.

Cheeky.... so I swapped them out again.

I reported the linking and article to the sites Admins.

I don't mind you linking to my articles, however please don't link to my images directly or reproduce the full text.
Please remove the images and cut the text down to an introduction.
I gain nothing by supplying your bandwidth.
Reply to this e-mail as soon as you recieve it please
www.NotAsCoolAsItSeems.com

Twenty four hours later the "author" ceased hot-linking to those 2 images. I never received any replies to my PM's so I swapped out the third image. 24 hours later he fixed that too.

By this point I was angry

You see I had received no replies to any PM's and the Admins of the site were endorsing the actions of the blogger. They were discussing it in an open chat box and in their own user profile comments, I'd signed up to post the earlier message and had read it all.

To top it all off I did a search for my articles title and they are listed at number one. Me? all the way down at eleven.

So I re-posted the images within in the articles comments on their site and asked the "blogger" to cut the article down to a reasonable teaser.

He deleted the images the next morning.

What to do?  my goal at this point was to make them remove the full article, I was kind of pissed.

I sent the Admins and the blogger a take-down notice by PM and e-mail

Later after no response I performed a "whois" to get the webhost - I emailed a complaint and takedown notice to the webhost (that won't do anything)

Later I went through my logs to find some IP addresses.

The countries the "blogger" and his Admins are from are quite large but they only have a few ISP's.

I added some deny rules to my htaccess file to stop them coming to my site or even viewing any of the content hosted on my site.

How does that help ?

Well it makes me feel better....oh and it lets me post the images to the comments of the stolen article again without them knowing.

You see when the site admins  or the "blogger" looks at the article and comments they will see only the usual text. Anyone visiting the site from outside of the IP ranges I have specified will get to see my pictures explaining what is going on. The pictures have been up for 2 days now

And because I was in a bad mood I made a few accounts, then made a few really friendly non-suspicious introductory posts (actually I made a lot) Each of the posts just happened to contain 1px*1px images. Their image system has no specified image dimensions  so I can just swap the 1px*1px images out later for larger more informative ones by changing a file name on my own server. This would probably be going too far but it's an option if things got messy and they started spamming or vandalising my site.

VICTORY - They took the article down

Surprisingly the Web-Host contacted me and the other sites admins. I gave them my side of the story, told them as honestly as I could remember everything that had transpired, even my own misguided deeds.

Another surprising developement was that Google had removed the site from the search results for the article. I hadn't sent them a notice as it needs to be signed and faxed, I did however leave a notices in the part of the search results where you can comment on the search results.

The site owner contacted me the next day. I re-stated my position, he apologised for the trouble and deleted the post. Shortly after the user e-mailed me to apologise for the week long event.

All is well that ends well.

Just so you know I also removed the posts containing my image bombs.