Hotlinking? 
When you copy and paste graphics from a webite to yours, you are stealing. You are stealing bandwidth.Every website owner pays for a specific amount of bandwidth or data transfer on a monthly basis. If they use more than their allowable amount, the website owner is required to pay either an overage fee (think of going over your cellphone minutes), or the website is shut down by the hosting company. Every time an image, sound or file is viewed on a html/php/xml page, several kilobytes are used. If an image is 30 kilobytes and is viewed 10 times 300 kB are used. Webmasters expect a certain amount of data usage per pageview. When you copy and paste an image to a messageboard that is viewed 1000 times per day, that image is pulling 30000kB of bandwidth from the original server. If 20 of those people then snag it by copying & pasting to their posts, then over 615Megabytes of bandwidth are being stolen on a daily basis. In a week, that would be over 4.2 Gigabytes of bandwidth. Since I pay for 10 Gigabytes per month, I would be shut down in 2 weeks!! Don't get burnt!! I change my images on a regular basis. Look what happened to Tina. She decided to hotlink a blinkie to a message board. This is what it looked like originally: 
See the nice blinkies.(I didn't check to see if the other blinkies are being stolen from other sites) This image was getting over 100 hits a day. Then I pulled a switch. Then all the visitors to her posts saw this!! 
Over 500 views over 5 days. I hope Tina's husband wasn't one of them.(Unless he really is a mailman). And no one on her message board emailed her!! Oh How embarassing!! Being embaressed by a switched image is the least of your worries. How about a cease & desist letter to YOUR ISP or web host? This can get you banned or risk having your site shut down. So as a user of graphics, what can you do? If you use them on a messageboard try some of the free hosting companies listed: Photobucket Imageshack Please ensure that you are following specific "Terms of Use" for the artist who's graphics you are using. To save to your computer "right click and save as" If you are a Graphic artist or webmaster, you can educate others by downloading this graphic and displaying it on your site ,ensuring you link it to this page. evelynmary.net/hotlink
 Thankyou, Eve Webmaster evelynmary.net |