Remember what I said, long ago, about there being no such thing as a free lunch? The same goes for folks who use my stuff on their web sites without crediting me. I mean, seriously, if someone wants to use one of my images, I don’t mind, but is it so hard to put it inside of a link back to here?
Fortunatley, I’m enough of a geek that I can take a look at the server access logs and notice when one of my images is being loaded by a site on another server. It’s happened a couple of times without bothering me, but just yesterday an image from my site was loaded about a hundred times via a link at someone else’s blog. The site which proved this camel-back-breaking straw is a blog called milkbottle. It’s in French, so I have no idea what it’s all about, but feel free to poke around if you’d like.
I was tempted, when I saw the link, to replace the image with a big .GIF file that said “Don’t Steal Bandwidth,” but instead I just put my URL on the image. After all, it’s not like they’re tying to sell something here. That’s an entirely different bale of straw.
Fortunately, the MT-Blacklist plugin has done a great job of blocking the most recent batch of spammers from posting any repeat attacks. If you’re running Movable Type, I highly recommend it. It doesn’t always work as a preemptive measure, but if the spammer is as dumb as the most recent batch, they’ll provide their own IP addresses… Which can be blocked in the Movable Type preferences.