Stolen Image & Bandwidth, Oh My!

Well, it finally happened. After 6 months, I found one of my images posted on another website. It was expected… it was bound to happen. Everyone who owns a website runs the risk of someone stealing their work. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way of the Internet. Information is very easy to copy.

Update 11:30am EST: I received an email from the infringing website’s Copyright Agent that my image has been removed. This has been confirmed and the issue is now closed. 🙂

Usually images that are copied are uploaded to another website by the website owner. But this isn’t always true. In this particular case, one of my images was uploaded by a visitor to the other website. When you allow visitors to upload to your website, there is a chance that someone may (and probably will) upload an image that he or she does not own the copyright to.

How do you find your image on another website?

If you’re lucky, someone who is familiar with your website will notice it and alert you to the infringement. Or, you can search your stats and look at all your referrers to see if there are any hot-linked images on the referring page. This is how I found my image… in my stats.

My mommy has owned a few websites for more than 14 years now. Unfortunately, she has seen her share of copyright infringement and has had bandwidth stolen. She was in a good mood when I asked her (teehee!), so she is allowing me to repost one of her articles on BaileyBeGood.com. The article is called, “What Can You Do About Copyright Infringement?”

So what do you do when you discover one of your images on another website? Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. I wrote down the URL of the website that contained my reposted image.

2. I wrote down the URL of the image URL.

3. I wrote down the URL of the page on my site where the original image lies.

4. Since this image is hot-linked, meaning that it’s linked directly to the image on my website’s server… it is also using my bandwidth. Everyone who has a website pays for a certain amount of bandwidth that’s included with their webhosting package. If for some reason this hot-linked image is on a site with heavy traffic or if the image becomes very popular, it is very possible to exceed your bandwidth limit. You could very well end up paying extra for bandwidth.

So since this image is hot-linked (see below for one method of preventing hot-linking on your own domain), I could pretty much make any image appear on that other website. But first I had to make sure that my image was still intact on my own website. I opened the original image; renamed it; and changed the name of the image on my website where it appears. This was my image that I found on another website:

5. I uploaded the newly renamed image to my server.

6. I created a new image the same size as the original, and saved it as the original image name.

7. I then uploaded the original file to my server. Here’s what’s displaying now on the infringing website:

8. Filled out a DMCA-Compliant letter (click here for a sample DMCA-Compliant Letter — thanks mommy!), and sent it to the Copyright Agent of the infringing website. On bigger sites, you can usually find information on how to report a copyright infringement on the site’s Terms & Conditions page. If there is none, you can always find a contact email to send your DMCA-Compliant letter to. If you cannot find any contact on the website at all, you can check the official WhoIS Database. Once you put a website into the database, you can find the registrar that the site has its domain registered with. Then you can search the registrar’s website for the infringing website’s contact information. OR… you can search Domain White Pages to skip a few steps. If there is any contact information for the infringing website, this site will show it in one step.

9. I emailed my DMCA-Compliant Letter to the infringing website’s Copyright Agent.

Now I wait. Since it’s a fairly large website, I’ll probably get an email back within a week, and my image will be removed from their webpage. And that will be the end of this issue. If they don’t respond and I get nowhere with the website owners, I will contact the infringing website’s web server company, and if I don’t hear from them, I’ll contact their domain registrar, and if I still don’t get a resolution (which is very unlikely, but it happens), I will contact all of the major search engines (ie: Google) and report not only my image (the old file name that’s displaying the stolen notice), but the infringing website as well.

And then my furry bloggy continues as usual… until I find the next infringement. And then I’ll start the whole process over again.

Here’s one way to prevent your files (images, pdfs, etc) from being hot-linked from another website:

If you have your own domain name and have access to creating .htaccess files, you can do a lot of things. The following code will block another website (unless you list it below) from displaying or linking directly to any file on your domain that you specify.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?baileybegood.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png|pdf|doc)$ - [F]


In the above code, all you have to do is copy and paste the above code into a new Wordpad file, name it .htaccess (it will save as .htaccess.txt, but you can rename it after). Replace baileybegood.com with your own domain name, and include any other file extensions you need in the line beginning with RewriteRule. Then upload your .htaccess file to the same directory you want to prevent hot-linking (whether it’s your image directory, or download directory). Now anytime anyone tries to hot-link directly to anything in the .htaccess file-protected directory, they will see a broken image and receive an error. Keep in mine that if you have Feedburner for your RSS or any other website that needs to display your images or files, you should include them in the code above (just copy the line with the domain above and add it directly underneath; one line per domain).

I hope all of this information has helped you in some way! If it has, I’d love to know!

By the way… sorry if I haven’t visited you in a couple of days — mommy’s got me helping with her websites, so I haven’t been able to visit many of my friends. I think she’s gonna owe me big time when I’m done.

Countdown:

Days until I’m 1 year old: 9 days, on June 18!
Days until we blast off into space: 19 days, on June 28!

*Extra Woofies*

I want to let you all know that I’ve changed the word verification for comments. I know how frustrating the old reCaptcha phrases were to follow, so I searched really hard to find something that was easy-to-use for everyone.

If you are on a computer (desktop or laptop), all you have to do is drag the image that it tells you to, from the left to the right image. If you are using anything other than a computer (like an iPad, iPhone, or other mobile device), you just need to click on the correct matching image on the left (it will tell you). The image will then automatically appear over the image on the right.

If you are experiencing any problems, please let me know in your comment so I can alert the developers of any issues. I truly hope this image verification is easy for everyone — thanks to those of you who have shared your opinions! Don’t forget I have to personally approve your comment, so it won’t show up right away. 🙂

Happy Wordless Thursday woofs & hugs,

~Bailey
P.S… If you’re a human who blogs about your furry, or a furry who blogs about your human… or even a furry who blogs about your life… I invite you to follow me via Google Friend Connect (see box in the right-hand column –>), and join me on Facebook. Please let me know you’ve visited — I love reading other blogs and making new friends. <3