Yet more unauthorised use of images uploaded to photo.net. Administrators, are you there?

I posted a question here a couple of weeks ago about the unauthorised

use of my images and other photographer�s images being hot linked

from photo.net without permission.<p>I was rather hoping that there

would be some response from the administrators about this abuse of

our images and photo.net�s bandwidth, but alas not even a sniff.<p>So

I�ll ask again. Are the administrators aware of this abuse and can

anything be done about it? Below are links to the two sites in

question<p><a href="http://www.xlmz.net/forum/viewthread.php?

tid=730&sid=R0Qra4dI">site 1</a><p><a

href="http://parssa.motime.com/1064959200">site 2</a><p>Thank you

Saw a lot of familiar photos there.,especially site 2wo. At least they have good taste.

One of the benefits of being a subscriber is that you are allowed to hot link to your images. This is normally blocked for non-subscribers.

<p>

I guess the downside of this is that other people can also hot link to your images.

<p>

 

The question of whether photo.net can do anything about it I'll have to leave to Brian. I'm not sure if we can turn off the hotlink feature for a subscriber (I would hope so), but if that's a feature you don't use then that would stop the problem. I'm also not sure if we can block hotlinks from specific sites or IP addresses.

<p>

This is certainly a problem and certainly needs addressing, but I don't do any of the system programming, so Brian's the only one who can really give you an answer about technical solutions to this problem.

<p>

The short term solution would be to delete and reload these images, but you'd lose ratings and comments of course.

<p>

Complaining to the websites in question can do no harm, though I'm not sure it will do much good either.

<p><pre>

Domain Name: MOTIME.COM

 

Created on..............: Sat, Mar 09, 2002

Expires on..............: Tue, Mar 09, 2004

Record last updated on..: Fri, Oct 03, 2003

 

Administrative Contact:

Marco Palombi

Marco Palombi

Viale D'Annunzio, 23

Milano, 20146

IT

Phone: +3928322265

Email: marco.palombi@letstv.com

 

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:

Register.Com

Domain Registrar

575 8th Avenue - 11th Floor

New York, NY 10018

US

Phone: 902-749-2701

Fax..: 902-749-5429

Email: domain-registrar@register.com

</pre>

===========================================================

<pre>

Domain name: xlmz.net

 

Registrant Contact:

xuhui

hui xu xumo-@163.com

13620167111 fax: 0757-6221112

nanhai nanhaishifan

fs GuangDong 528200

CN

 

Administrative Contact:

hui xu xumo-@163.com

13620167111 fax: 0757-6221112

nanhai nanhaishifan

fs GuangDong 528200

CN

 

Technical Contact:

Product Team cs_eservice_cn@lycos-asia.com

63605880-350 fax: 63605338

Ocean Towers,No.550 East of Yan An Road

Shanghai Shanghai 200001

CN

 

Billing Contact:

Product Team cs_eservice_cn@lycos-asia.com

63605880-350 fax: 63605338

Ocean Towers,No.550 East of Yan An Road

Shanghai Shanghai 200001

CN

 

</pre>

the photos are linked, rename them, then reload them with the edit photo area, the links will fail and the people linking your photos will get little white squares w/X's instaed of your photos, they will have to go through the process of re-linking them...

Bob, thanks for your reply.<p>As I have my own website I never have the need to hot link to my images on photo.net, so if this could indeed be turned off it would solve my problem. Unfortunately it wouldn�t help the other photographers involved.<p>I understand that if I delete the images and reload them that I would loose the ratings and comments. Frankly I don�t give a damn about the ratings but would hate to loose the comments that many contributors have so kindly made.<p>As this abuse has affected many other photographers, I really feel that ideally the solution needs to come from photo.net if this is possible, so that the problem is solved for all. Certainly blocking hotlinks from specific sites would seem to be the answer if this can be done.

I looked at both sites. In addition to the fact that they've stolen images from Photo.net without permission -- They have my name listed under an image that isn't even mine!!

I agree that a technical solution at photo.net would be the best way to deal with this. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the server configuration to tell if this is possible, and if so, how difficult it would be. The simple solution would probably to block any photo.net access from either domain. However that only takes care of those two. I suspect if there are two, there are probably twenty - or even more. And that's only the sites hotlinking. There are probably dozens more who just steal the images and post them on their site.

 

I don't know how many people legitimately use the hotlinking ability and whether it's possible to make that an option which is selectable from a user's workspace. I suppose almost anything is *possible*, it's really a question of how difficult it is to do. If people are actually using it legitimately, we can't really turn it off for everyone.

 

Hopefully Brian will have a comment when he's had a chance to look at the situation.

Yeah, as Mary says. Same thing here. My name on a picture I didn't take (two cases). As for the other site, I can't read anything so I can't navigate on it... Any clue ?

<p>

Thanks a lot, Keith, for informing us, and thanks Bob for the quick response. What I would like to know is whether photo.net intends to e-mail these 2 sites for now, to ask them to take it all down, or not. That's just to know whether we all need to take individual actions or not. Thanks again.

Well, it certainly could not hurt if individual photo.net members sent email to the administrative contacts of these websites (they are listed above), detailing exactly what their particular objection is and requesting that the links and images be removed.

 

I'm not an official contact for photo.net so it's not my place to send complaints. Our official Administrative contact is Lisa Surati (lisasurati@photo.net) so it's probably up to Lisa (or Brian) to officially contact these sites on behalf of photo.net. I can't comment on what they intend to do, because I don't know!

Ok. Thanks, Bob.

Since photo.net prevents hotlinking of images for non-subscriber accounts, it is

clearly <i>possible</i> on the server level. The standard way to prevent hotlinking

across the board is to filter the referer headers. Whether the difficulty of doing this on

a per-user basis is prohibitive is, of course, something only people familiar with the

internals of photo.net know. I usually let the hotlinking on my site slide for blogs and

personal photo lists like the ones mentioned. Sometimes, however, a popular blog

can represent a quite a bit of bandwidth so I either shut them out or tell apache to

send them an ad instead of the photo.

This is a problem with any picture put on the web and considering the stress photo.net server are already under, doing not only an "allowed at all" but also an "allowed for this referer" check is a good idea. It would also need an interface where people can enter/maintain their blocked/allowed domains.

 

But since the "allowed at all" check is already in there, may as well create a simple interface to allow people to turn in on and off for themselves.

 

Although I think that in many cases, offenders will switch to simply downloading the picture and uploading it to their own site.

It isn't so much a bandwidth issue as a copyright issue.

 

Out of 6-7 million retrievals of photos from our servers per day, only about 90,000 of them are from external sites, such as these two, a little over 1%. This is a small load. Also, much of this load is legitimate, and intended by subscribers, whose images are theoretically the only ones that can be linked like this.

 

These two sites are pretty obscure and don't generate noticable traffic at all. Most of the external sites that are linking to images on photo.net are blog sites, auction sites, and other photography forum sites where one assumes that the person who set up the link was the person who uploaded the photo to photo.net. In fact, being able to do this is a privelege only afforded to subscribers, although for technical reasons sometimes the subscriber-image checking is turned off. It has been turned off in recent weeks.

 

I can imagine various schemes to let subscribers say which external sites should be able to link to their images, so that only their intended sites can do it. This would require some implementation. An easier system to implement would be a blanket block of particular external sites, but this would have to be done on a case by case basis.

Brian, thanks for your response. I think it better that photo.net implements a block on particular external sites rather than individual photographers having to take their own actions, which would probably be unsuccessful anyway.