Friday Tech Tip: Leaching Images
Posted By RichC on March 30, 2007
Posting of images on personal pages such as Myspace or Facebook or placement of images to forums is a regular practice for those using the internet. Instead of creating personal images or at minimum ‘serving’ them from ones own file serving space, people often leech images from web servers owned by others. This practice is inappropriate etiquette at minimum and perhaps theft. This is often bandwidth intensive when the images being served are large (or contain audio or video) or are used by sites with heavy traffic and can cause problems for the host server, not to mention high bandwidth bills. Don’t do it.
On the opposite side of the coin, the pages doing the ‘stealing’ are susceptible themselves to cunning host site owners. This point was hammered home the other day since the abusing site was the MySpace page of presidential hopeful John McCain. A campaign helper for Senator McCain used a common template to create the page which is free to be used so as long as credit is giving to the creator. In this case it was Newsvine‘s Founder and CEO Mike Davidson. Davidson has no problem with people using his template, but expects users to host their own image files — McCain’s helper did not and ended up using images hosted on someone else’s server … and under someone else’s control. In this case, Mr. Davidson decided to play a prank on the campaign and replaced some of the images on the site, with ones that read a little differently. The details of the story can be found on Newsvine and might make for a good lesson for us all; don’t use the links to images from places other than under your control.
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