Please don’t.
Sometimes it happens by accident, simply through a lack of knowledge about web etiquette, propriety and how the whole URI system works; other times it’s a conscious effort to scrape visual content from one site and plop it onto another without costing the receiving site any precious bandwidth. Either way, it’s totally unacceptable.
I’ve noticed for the past couple of weeks that Grape Juice’s incoming links list has been growing in fits and spurts, which is great! I check all incoming links and respond to comments on our content whenever possible, but in several of the new link cases, there was no Grape Juice material to be found save for leeched images still bearing our domain name in the link. I suspect that in the cases I’m talking about, its simple misunderstanding and not an organized attempt at leeching. The cases seem isolated and are probably not a huge drain on our bandwidth, but I thought I would bring it up seeing that a lot of the images on these sites are posted directly from other sites…I can’t be the only one that has noticed.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term hot-linking, here’s a pretty good definition:
“Hotlinking” (also called “hot linking”, “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft. …Some disadvantages of hot linking worth considering are that the webpage generally loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web hosting server than the webpage is hosted on” — From Free-Webhosts.com
The general rule is that you save a copy of whatever image you wish to use onto your web server, and credit the site that you took it from. Please don’t just insert images into your posts using pre-existing URIs.
