Let’s Talk About Hot Linking Shall we?
Posted by Kirk M on 02 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Blogging
“Hot Linking”, “Direct Linking” or “Leeching” is the topic today. What it is and how it applies to common courtesy within the Blogosphere.
First a definition:
“Hotlinking” (also called “hot linking”, “direct linking” “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hot linked file, but often is considered as intellectual property theft in the context of original material.
The most basic form of hot linking is using a URL to an image on another site that’s not yours in order to place that same image on your site. This is done using something called “image tags” and can be used in place of storing your images on your own host/server or separate online storage. There’s nothing wrong in using image tags as long as it’s to your own images residing in your own online image storage or from another one of your sites. It’s when you use an image tag to place an image on your site that’s located on someone else’s site is where the line is drawn, especially if you do not ask their permission first and that’s just not cool.
Bottom line…don’t do it! Besides, it’s just bad form. Why? Because even in this day and age where the popular web hosts bandwidth allowances are usually in the low terabytes (frickin’ huge in other words), when you’re hot linking as described above, you’re using up someone else’s bandwidth every time that image is viewed on your site. It’s not your bandwidth and you’re not paying for it so please don’t do it. You also might be taking a chance of hot linking to an original copyrighted work done by the site owner themselves…and that site owner might be a real a**hole when it comes to someone stealing their work. Word to the wise there.
There’s not any solid “do’s and don’ts” type rules when it comes to blogging so we have to police ourselves as it were. There’s no good reason to hot link to images and media that belong on someone else’s site unless they give you their explicit permission to do so. Besides, it’s just good form among blogger’s not to.
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5 Comments »
on 05 Feb 2008 at 9:33 am 1.Rick Cockrum said …
The day after you posted this I noticed that bandwidth usage on my theatre site jumped to several hundred megabytes per day. It seems a popular site in Poland decided to hotlink to my movie poster images. Fortunately, my host uses cpanel and I was able to easily block it, so all they get are 404 errors now.
on 05 Feb 2008 at 11:20 am 2.KirkM said …
Hey Rick,
You know, with all my WordPress type (so called) knowledge I never thought about using the cPanel to stop leeching. You always miss something I suppose. How exactly do you go about this anyway?
on 05 Feb 2008 at 11:29 am 3.Rick Cockrum said …
It’s a piece of cake, Kirk.
1. Go into cPanel.Click on HotLink Protection in the Security pane.
2. Click the Enable button.
3. In the textbox below the Enable button, list all the websites that are allowed to link to your images. Put one site per line.
4. In the next textbox, make sure all the image formats you use are listed. The list should look something like this: jpg.jpeg.png.gif
5. If you want the thieves redirected to another url, enter it in the next text box and click the checkbox below it. If you don’t care, leave this box empty. They’ll just get a 404 file not found error page.
6. Click the submit button.
on 05 Feb 2008 at 11:47 am 4.KirkM said …
That easy huh? Well what do you know. Since I don’t want any site (except mine of course) hotlinking to my images then no problem there. Thanks for the info Rick! I’m busy updating a couple of friends sites to the latest WP security release (2.3.3) is why I asked. I’ll take care of it after I finish.
on 19 Feb 2008 at 8:02 am 5.blog.rightreading.com » Hotlinking and its discontents said …
[...] enough not to hotlink; there are others as well. If you want to prevent hotlinking you can use set only certain sites to link to your images using cpanel, but I would rather just edit .htaccess, as described around the web in several places, such as the [...]