As most people know by now, we have a site called "bummedbytheboss.co.uk" which was a project to monitor logs ... anyway, we included an image (with permission I might add!) of a character played by Catherine Tate. Imagine my surprise when I found a huge influx of traffic from a blog at http://www.singletrackworld.com/. What someone had done was simply link to the image on our server so that everytime the post was displayed the image was delivered from my network instead of their own. I equate this to someone stealing my money as the 585 people who received the image did so without paying for the server resources on my network.
So how do we deal with this? Very easily actually. First of all we change the name of the image on the server and the source code of the site and then upload another very offensive image with the same name. The result is that our site continues to work but the image we uploaded (and I make them VERY offensive) now appears in the post stealing what they think is an image of Catherine Tate. What the users are actually going to see is shown at www.ladybirdinternet.com/babystab.jpg (be warned - it contains the C word!) and if you want to see what it has done to the forum it was stolen by then click here.
What I found really annoying was that we took the time and trouble to license the photograph we used. The photograph licenses cost us less than a tenner so it's not the money - it annoys me that in these days of Facebook and bitTorrents people think that they can just steal stuff without any thought or, indeed, any perception that they are actually doing anything wrong. I've had entire web sites lifted and modified before showing up elsewhere, photographs cropped and published without authorisation but this is a "backdoor" theft that actually costs real money; remember, we pay for the bandwidth we use (as do all internet companies) and the more that gets stolen the higher our prices have to be.
So be aware that if you steal an image from us we will prosecute you and if you simply link to an image on our server from a totally unrelated web site we absolutely reserve the right to replace it with the most offensive image we can find and leave it to you to explain to your customers why it happened. You've been warned!