Every now and again I go into my web domain’s “cPanel” (control panel) and poke around the Latest Visitors tool. This tool lists access incidents of files, images, videos, etc., most recent hits at the top.
I found this peculiar reference (see photo above) to a snapshot of a TV tray I had posted on my site in 2007 when I was setting up an artists workshop.
The “referrer” is the website somewhere in the world that is accessing and displaying my image. This common occurrence is called “bandwidth stealing” because it takes advantage of bandwidth (web access) that another entity (in this case: me) pays for to serve the resource to them. In this case, it’s no big deal. I pay for unlimited bandwidth with my host. The other issue of copyright is a little more personal. Again, in this case, no big deal. But really, this is my photo on my site, and some guy somewhere, describing how he build something out of a TV tray, was too lazy to go shoot a photo of what he made, and instead just linked to my image.
His forum post looked like this (that’s my image – click for larger view).
A screenshot of the post as I found it. That’s my photo.
So I googled “TV tray” with other words until I found an image I thought would be a humorous replacement.
I uploaded a copy of that image to my site in the same location the TV tray image was filed, renamed the older photo of mine, edited my webpage that referenced that photo so it would have the proper, new file name, the renamed this new photo to the original filename and re-uploaded the referring page to make my webpage look as it did before.
Now the “bandwidth stealer’s” post elsewhere in the world looks like this (click for larger):
How the post looks now, after I replaced the photo with a different one with the exact filename of the original.
I wonder how long it will take him to notice.
See the original post here — maybe no one’s caught it yet.
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