Is bandwidth theft illegal? Considering actions beyond htaccess

[shwn]

There is a large and very busy site directly accessing JavaScript files from my site. I have htaccess set up to result in 403, but still, such a large number of requests ...

I've sent them a couple of emails about it but haven't heard back nor seen any changes. I'm considering more drastic action - pretty easy with js

Since this is a large organization with undoubtedly a lot of legal muscle I'm a bit worried about consequences. Do I have a right to mess up their site if they're stealing from mine? Or am I just asking for trouble?

(Actually, I'm probably just being paranoid. How could there be anything wrong with me modifying a file on my own server?!)

[Ron]

Only for their server, modify it to send an email with a screen shot back to your secondary gmail account, and be sure that it opens a couple of porno sites, pop unders and other annoying things. Perhaps opening up a phishing site or two, too.

But you're right, you're just asking for trouble. Then again, they'd not likely have a leg to stand on, since your Terms of Service prohibits this kind of direct back-door linking....?

Or you could just leave the 403 in place

[thecoalman]

The people that own the site probably have no clue and you can blame the designer. The fact that it's a JS file pretty much proves he/she is an idiot. Not too familiar with the language but if it were me I'd have full screen notice go up simply linking to your site or stating bandwidth theft or whatever.

I would not consider doing anything else as you might get yourself into trouble with the SE's for starters.

I had a Republican Women's site in California hot linking to a flag that was on my site once. I have Republican leanings but that was too much to pass up and they were proudly proclaiming Al Gore for president.

[Frank Broughton]

very funny coalman.... lol

[thecoalman]

I have a 1px X 32000PX transparent .gif

So here's the scenario... someone finds an image on my site and decides to hotlink to it. The go about their business and place it in a blog, facebook or whatever the case may be however those sites rarely check for the size of the image and there is no size attribute:

<img src="some_image.jpg" > ... By default the browser will display the image at it's native size which usually results in the layout being totally broken on most sites. At the very least they get a big huge horizontal scroll bar.

Now the best part is since the person doing the hotlinking has the original image cached they are not aware their site layout is broken. By the time they find out the hotlinked image is no longer something they would think of as causing the problem and I'd imagine most of them spend hours trying to figure out what happened since there is no viewable reason as to why it's breaking so bad. :P

[Gwaihir]

Sure you can change files on your server as you like. Can't see how that could get you into any legal trouble. It may however affect your reputation, both with the SEs and in "the real world", depending on what stunt you pull.

I'd go with thecoalman's first suggestion: simply have the JavaScript link those not filtered away by .htaccess along to a page of your choosing that states why they're there and welcomes them to visit (the rest of) your site.

[Ron]

OK, here's an example of what I really do for bigtime sites hotlinking into my albums:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(profile\.)?myspace.com(/)?.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(comments\.)?myspace.com(/)?.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(www\.)?myspace.com(/)?.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(home\.)?myspace.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .* http://mydomain.com/pictures/StolenImage.gif [R,L]

The .gif resizes and looks horrible but uses only a couple of k of my bandwidth. I used an external redirect instead of just delivering up the file in case they linked to multiple pics, also to give them a chance at finding the hotlinked images.
The actual list is much longer.
I'm sure you could modify this to suit your needs.

[shwn]

The issue with this particular bandwidth thief has now been resolved and I've switched back to the 403 for now. I think I'll change it to a redirect though.

I didn't do anything outrageous, but definitely felt the need to get their attention. Emails alone didn't work.

I'm assuming the problems with SE's and reputation would be if I did something like send them to an explicit sex page or something?

Messing with htaccess freaks me out. Setting up for localhost testing first.

[Gwaihir]

Reputation with SEs: yeah, pagerank and all that stuff goes both ways. If an SE finds links to questionable materials in your pages / files served from your domain, it could affect your ranks. Reputation in general: whatever you do might lead back to you. Since it will be seen / experienced by the visitors of that big site, there's potentially a lot of people who can blame you for whatever you put them through.

[colossus]

Hi:

A couple of years ago, someone found himself in this scenario, and deviced a funny counterattack:

http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/...ng-john-mccain



Regards: Colossus