Interesting Approach to Hotlink Prevention

[jason]

A List Apart has an interesting article on a different approach to holink prevention.

Sparter Image Hotlinking Prevention

Basically, the author presents a method of preventing others from linking to your images with <img> tags while allowing them to link to your images with <a> tags. If someone links with an <a> tag to one of your images, mod_rewrite kicks in an presents the image in a formatted gallery page, showing off your image and your site.

--Jason

[misja]

Thanks for the link!

The part about Google was very useful...
I was wondering how to let the google cache past the hotlink protection (since it uses IPs instead of a domain name).

[Ron]

Down near the end of the article, they give specific code to allow google's cache to link to your images:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]

[Spathiphyllum]

Originally posted by misja
I was wondering how to let the google cache past the hotlink protection (since it uses IPs instead of a domain name).

Are you sure you want to do this? Is Google caching the link to the image or the image file itself, sort of like a caching proxy? If you allow what might be the world's largest internet accessible database to archive your images, might it defeat an advantage of regulating hot-linking? Someone could do a search for "misja's extremely valuable images that misja wants semi-protected" and Google will promptly list them. The, um, image thief can then pull that image off of Google's cache for their personal use without any attribution to you and you would be none the wiser... unless, of course, you either stumbled across it being used on another site or had subscribed to a spidering image tracker.

Of course hot-linking won't really protect your content for copyright infringment but it will allow you a more tightly regulated distribution of your files. I have caught copyright violators by reviewing my logs and been able to force them to remove the content based on those logs. If everything gets cached by Google, you'll never know about those infringements. Just something to consider. I'm still pretty ignorant regarding all that goes on in the backend world of search engines and archiving web data.

[Ron]

Isn't the most often requested reason for hotlinking protection to reduce bandwith consumption?

I know that the few places I've banned from linking is because someone has hotlinked an image of mine (usually a really big one, too) in a popular bulletin board, so that I get 100's of hits on that image, no visitors, no credit, and the worst thing is -- most of the visitors to that site who are viewing the bulletibn board have no interest in my image.

I've even had an image hotlinked as someone's avatar. <headshake>

[Spathiphyllum]

Originally posted by Ron
Isn't the most often requested reason for hotlinking protection to reduce bandwith consumption?

Yes. (Wow, no longwinded elaboration in my response... must be your lucky day. )

On to part II:
But there is that added benefit of tracking access to your content a little better. It's a minor benefit but everything helps. As a matter of fact, one web developer was hot-linking my layout images (~90% of them) and using my XHTML source (stolen, not hot-linked) to create "his" domain presence for another client. It truly was the most blatant and offensive theft of my copyrighted material that I'd ever seen. Man was my blood boiling. Fortunately my legal follow-up ended that particular endeavor post haste. Oops, so much for your lucky day.

[misja]

Yep, my problem was just as Ron describes, people using images hosted on my domain as avatars (my images are small) in popular forums ... The images are not "extremely valuable", it's just a bandwidth saving thing.

And I guess it also discourages people to copy my site the way they did to Spathiphyllum ...