Mad Words Wednesday

Today’s post wasn’t supposed to go like this. It was supposed to have a couple of really cute photos of me, but instead, those will have to wait. Don’t worry, you’ll hopefully get to see those next week. I thought it was much more important for my friends to read the following, ’cause if you own a website, it’s very possible your images have been stolen and put on another website.

9:20am Update: My mommy checked the infringing links she posted below, and they’re coming up “Not Found.” It looks like BaileyBeGood has might have already been removed from this website (she’ll check later too). If you put your website name into the search box on the page ( Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there, (for example, search sugarthegoldenretriever:
(Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=sugarthegoldenretriever ) and you will see if any of your photos or images display on that website. As of 9:45am, there were numerous pages of sugarthegoldenretriever.com’s photos, hot-linked on Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there.

6pm Update: It appears that my mommy was not too clear about what she meant in this post. A couple of people misunderstood and thought she meant that the people on the list were stealing bandwidth from us. But that’s not what the list is. The list contains websites of just a few of my friends who have photos hot-linked (stolen) at the following website: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there. Please, if you have any questions, I know my mommy will try and answer them. 🙂

6-27-11 Update: Bad site is back up and running under a different domain.

Continue with the Original post:

Remember this post: Stolen Image & Bandwidth, Oh My!? Well, my mommy thought it would be a good idea to explore things further. It’s a good thing she did, ’cause she found another website that embedded my YouTube videos (which is OK), but they also took 3 screen shots of each video and posted those on their website, which is not allowed. She sent them a DMCA-compliant email and those pages have been removed.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with all of you. Well, since this starts to get too complicated for a soon-to-be puppy of 1 year old, I think I’ll let my mommy explain. I asked her to share her knowledge so you can protect your copyright too.

Here’s what I’ll be doing today while she’s working hard to protect my copyright. 🙂

My favorite lounging position, on my favorite couch by the window.

OK mommy, it’s all yours… 😉

Hi friends. I’m so sorry to intrude on Bailey’s post, but I discovered a website that was posting images from blogs including Bailey’s. In reviewing the images (the few that managed to sneak past the code we had added), I was surprised to learn that many of Bailey’s friend’s had images posted on the infringing website as well. These images were hot-linked and were stealing bandwidth (if you own your own website this is not good).

I learned something else while I was there. I noticed that a few of Bailey’s images were being displayed, even though we had an .htaccess file that included code (mentioned in the Stolen Image & Bandwidth post) to prevent her images from being hot-linked on another website. On my own websites, I had different code inside my .htaccess file. If you have your own website, you should become familiar with .htaccess files. Read further for a few helpful links.

Getting back to the two codes… I thought I would try putting the two codes together in the .htaccess file, to see if this would stop my images from displaying on the infringing website. After I added the new code, the majority of Bailey’s images that were displaying on the infringing website (which was a lot!) now displayed “Image Cannot Be Displayed” on the infringing website. There were only a couple that still displayed. Also, there were images of Bailey’s that I could not prevent from displaying, because they were hosted on other websites such as Facebook, Cafepress, etc.

Owning a website is hard work. Honest website owners can never stop defending their copyright. It’s unfortunate that we have to constantly be on guard because of thieves, but if you spend a little time each week or even each month, reviewing your stats (which is where I found this infringing website) and/or just searching Google, you should be able to keep your website somewhat free of theft. It’s impossible to be totally free of all website theft all the time, but you could come close!

I am not going to link the infringing website to this post — I do not want to give them anymore back links. But I will post it for you to copy and paste into your browser.

Before I get to that, I want to show you the entire code I have added to Bailey’s .htaccess file in the image folder:


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

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.yourdomain.com" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://yourdomain.com" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.yourdomain.com/" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://yourdomain.com/" local_ref=1
<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=local_ref
</FilesMatch>
<Files *>
deny from colo.iinet.com
deny from iterasi.net
deny from Domain name removed 'cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there
</Files>
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

Remember: You can only do this if you own your own domain name. If you’re not familiar with .htaccess files, you should first contact your webhosting company to make sure you are allowed to use .htaccess. If you have any questions about creating the file, or where it should reside, you should contact your webhosting company.

How to create an .htaccess file:

For those of you who would like to create an .htaccess file and add the following code, here’s all you have to do:

1. Open Wordpad or Notepad.
2. Copy and paste the above code, replacing yourdomain with your real domain name.
3. Where it says, “deny from colo.iinet.com, deny from iterasi.net, and deny from Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there” — these are just a few of the sites we have blocked access to our websites. You can add other sites here as well.

• color.iinet.com is used to block the website iterasi.com, which is a web archiving service.
• iterasi.net is the same as above
• Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there is used to block our images from being hot-linked and displayed on Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there (this is the infringing website and the subject of this post. More below).

4. Save your file as .htaccess (it will automatically save as .htaccess.txt, but you can rename it once you’ve uploaded it to your server, or before you upload it if you use an FTP program such as WS_FTP.
5. Make sure you place the .htaccess file in the folder where your images are located.

There are many things you can do with an .htaccess file. This is a good site for beginners. Here’s another, and here’s a website where you can test your hot-link image protection.

Now for the point of this post.

As I was searching for images to include in the DMCA-compliant email that I sent to Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there for Bailey’s images, I noticed a lot of images that were hot-linked from Bailey’s friend’s websites. Some of those websites are on their own domain, and some are hosted on Blogger and WordPress. Wherever these sites are hosted, your copyright is being infringed upon. It’s time to take action.

What I’ve done below, is post the actual URL where I found many of your images. What you really need to do, is visit Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there and do a search on your own website. First search the name of your site (without the extension .blogspot.com, wordpress.com or other .com), and then search with the extension.

If your website name is on the following list, head over to the URL of the infringing website (listed below) and claim your copyright! Send a DMCA-compliant email to webmaster(at)Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there and request that all images hot-linked and copyrighted by your website, be removed.

Even if your website name is not on the following list, you should visit the above site anyway and do a search on your own name, and also the names of your friend’s sites.

I only went through the first 11 pages of my search for baileybegood, but there were many more pages.

Websites that have had their images stolen: (Please read update above first if you haven’t yet…)

1. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=2

• It’s Me Buddy’s Blog
• Link Bartholomew

2. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=3

• RA Husky

3. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=4

• RA Husky
• Adventures of Anna the GSD
• The Teacher’s Pets
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• All I Wanna Do Is P…

4. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=5

• RA Husky
• Adventures of Anna the GSD
• The (mis)Adventures of Sage
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• According to Gus
• All I Wanna Do Is P…

5. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=6

• RA Husky
• Adventures of Anna the GSD
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• The Teacher’s Pets
• Bert’s Blog
• Kol’s Notes
• The Dogs of Greenhill Farm

6. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=7

• RA Husky
• Kol’s Notes
• Bert’s Blog
• 24 paws of Love
• All I Wanna Do Is P…

7. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=8

• Five Sibes
• Kol’s Notes
• It’s Me Buddy’s Blog
• The Dogs of Greenhill Farm
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• The Teacher’s Pets
• Brian’s Home
• Sugar the Golden Retriever
• Amber’s Personal Diary
• White Dog Diary Online
• Simple Things

8. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=9

• Five Sibes
• The Dogs of Greenhill Farm
• The Teacher’s Pets
• Sugar the Golden Retriever
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• Bert’s Blog
• Chronicles of Cardigan
• Boondocks the Wonder Dog
• They Call Me the Booker Man
• CowSpotDog

9. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=10

• Sugar the Golden Retriever
• Snoopys Dog Blog
• 24 paws of Love
• The Teacher’s Pets
• Brian’s Home
• RA Husky
• Cooper and Lola

10. URL: Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there/search.php?wd=baileybegood&page=11

• Brian’s Home
• RA Husky
• Cooper and Lola

After viewing pages of a baileybegood search term, I then typed in baileybegood.com in the search box on Domain name removed ’cause it currently has non-family-friendly links on there and found a lot more images. Thankfully, many of them did not display because of my .htaccess file. I did find a couple of images that for whatever reason, the code did not hide. I added those images and the pages I found them on to the DMCA-compliant email, and sent it off. I’m now awaiting a reply.

Before I left the infringing website, I decided to search a few other websites on Bailey’s Friend’s list. I was sad to discover that the following sites also had copyrighted images and photos on the infringing website:

• Honey the Great Dane (searched bighoneydog)
• Jan’s Funny Farm (searched jansfunnyfarm)
• Tanner Trains the Family (searched brudy1120)
• Dog is God in Reverse (searched dogisgodinreverse)

I wasn’t too surprised.

If you’ve never protected your copyright before, this all may seem a bit overwhelming. It’s a shame that we have to defend our work, when thieves get to take anything they want, whenever they want. If we do nothing and allow them to use our website for their gain, we are letting them win.

I hope some of what I’ve shared in this post will help you protect your photos and images. Please forgive Bailey for not visiting your blogs as often as she usually does — I have been hogging her computer time the past few days and I apologize for that. The last thing that Bailey would want to do is let you think that she has forgotten you. Trust me, she hasn’t. 😉

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll do my best to answer them. 🙂

~JM

Back to Bailey…

Thanks, mommy! <3 I'm taking part in today's Wordless Wednesday Blog Hop, so please visit some of the blogs below for some other Wordless Wednesday posts! Countdown:

Days until I’m 1 year old: 3 days, on June 18!
Days until we blast off into space: 13 days, on June 28!

Ahhhh! I can’t believe I’m gonna be 1 year old this Saturday!
I wanna stay a puppy!!

*Extra Woofies*

For the word verification: 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. Don’t forget I have to personally approve your comment, so it won’t show up right away. 🙂

Happy Wednesday woofs & hugs,

~Bailey (Yep, I’m a girl)
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