Why hotlinking without permission is not advisable…

Heh, I found this amusing.

One of the pics on a previous post is an image of David Tennant from the official BBC homepage for Doctor Who. This image now comes up if you do a Google image search for either “David Tennant” or “tenth Doctor”. Several months back, I noticed some people were beginning to hotlink to the image without permission, and I really don’t like my image bandwidth being used without permission. So, I went ahead and set up an anti-hotlinking feature for the images on my site, where hotlinked images are replaced with a smaller version of the site banner.

This evening, I was checking my webserver logs, and noticed someone had hotlinked to the Tennant image from a MySpace profile page. I went to the page, and was greeted by the following hilarity:

A MySpace page gets “pwned” by the hotlink blocker…

He’s already changed the background image; I think he quickly found out what he wanted wasn’t what he got. Still, let this be a lesson to you, kids: don’t hotlink to images without permission. You may not always be happy with what happens…

One thought on “Why hotlinking without permission is not advisable…”

  1. I ran the ‘first’ Jon Heder online site right around when the Napolean Dynamite craze hit. I had a few images of him posted on my site, and the amount of hotlinking I got from people finding the picture in Google Images to all SORTS if Myspace sites. There were three or four I could remember, maybe even more. God I remember the logs.

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