Lukfilm has me wondering how to catch bandwidth theives?

[Joemonkey]

I'm pretty sure the way he catches them on Ebay is by searching for the same item and seeing if his pic has been copied, but how do I know if someone has a lot of pics from joemonkey.com on their website, but they're just pointing them to my pics instead of hosting them themselves?

how do places online keep direct linking from happening? Like when someone hosts on tripod and you click to it, it just gives an "image hosted by tripod" message unless you drag the link into the title bar.

There a way to set this up free and easy?

I understand Lukfilm's situation is strange though, because if he had something like that enabled, even his OWN auctions wouldn't be allowed to have pics he hosts in them... unless you can only allow links to certian exact URLs insead of IP addresses?

 

[minendo]

Track referrers to your webspace.

 

[Joemonkey]

so do this constantly to monitor if my bandwidth is being stolen? man i don't have that kind of extra time just lying around

 

[yllus]

If you have access to your server logfiles, you could write a simple Perl script to parse the log and see what *.jpg, *.gif or *.png files are being requested by which URLs. You scan the list manually and see if something you didn't put up yourself shows up.


Coders Shall Inherit The Earth.

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
so do this constantly to monitor if my bandwidth is being stolen? man i don't have that kind of extra time just lying around

It's very easy and doesn't take a huge amount of time.

If you have a web host who uses cPanel control panel, there's a feature called FTP/web stats which shows your referrer logs.

So let's say you have an eBay auction for a Canon A80 digicam, your picture file is titled canona80.jpg ... you would look in your web stats logs to see when canona80.jpg was accessed. It will link directly to other forums and web sites where that picture was used. They are STEALING YOUR PICTURE AND BANDWIDTH without your permission. Of course if they were smart they would save the picture and host it on their own web site using their bandwidth and not yours 😉

So again it's very easy and doesn't take a lot of time.

 

[C'DaleRider]

Easiest way to prevent bandwith stealing is to print your nick, or name, or something on your photos.......would seem to stop them cold that way.

 

[Windogg]

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