Hotlinking is against the law

I've been looking around the Internet and discovered that there are people that are hotlinking images from one of my websites. This may not seem like a big deal, but did you know that when you get a website and start paying the various fees on it, one of those is for a set amount of bandwidth? If you go over that set amount in a month then either the website goes down for the remainder of the month, or your hosting provider charges you for the extra bandwidth.

This is money out of your pocket so that others can have your images on their websites. Or in forums, or blogs, or...

Check your logs periodically to see who links to you, backtrack to their sites and see if it is an actual link that will send you traffic, or if they are stealing bandwidth from your site to save on their own site fees. People have used my images on their websites, on their blogs as their picture, within blog posts, and on forums.

There are a lot of people out there that when they find such theft will post pornographic material in its place. I know of one fellow that switched images on his own site and got a nasty email from someone saying that MySpace was being hacked by someone claiming to be the guy and he should look into it or if it was really him -- the email then faded into threats.

All the guy did was change his own picture on his own domain. Not his fault it changed the picture on all the places that had stolen the image and his bandwidth.

Don't hotlink. If you don't know what a hotlink is run a Google search and find out before you post any image anywhere on the Internet.