TechKumar

Before diving into the article let us see what Hotlinking is?

Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located.   – from Wikipedia.

For instance if somebody copy-and-paste one of your popular posts on other site, then you are sure to lose the limelight of your article on your site and most of all you have to pay for the bandwidth used by the copied(or stolen) images.

David Airey a web desiginer from Ireland, faced hotlinking problem when one of his articles got the limelight, which also attracted some hotlinkers, who directly used some of his images on the other sites without notifying and without proper credit given to the article. David tried to contact through email, but no one responded, so he decided to stop this hotlinking by himself. He used the .htaccess code to replace every image that is directly copied from his server with another image and here is what it looked on the hotlinked website.

David replaced every image that was taken from his website with the image below.

The hotlinker had no chance but to send an apology mail, and then removed the whole post that he copied.

What do you think? is this the right way to deter the hotlinking issue? share your experiences and opinions.