More On Bandwidth Theft

[Deb]

I received the following email today and found it disturbing to say the least (what host wouldn't?) I thought I would share the email with you and ask your opinions of this service as well.

---------------
Greetings my friends,

I believe that this is important to all of us. It's a matter of bandwidth theft and it's really bad http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif

Arriba Vista is taking images from websites without permission. They send a search spider through your web site and they harvest every single image that you have and they put those image names into a database.

When someone [goes] there and does a keyword search, they are given thumbnails of your image, and when they click the thumbnail, the full size image is generated (your image from your site) and can be downloaded directly off of their web site, which means the person never has to visit your site to see more or to download the image.

To get the full size image, they pull it directly from your web server.

We know this is bandwidth stealing. If you aren't familiar with how web hosts charge for bandwidth, they generally give you an allotted amount, and if you go over that, they charge you more money for every MEG that you go over. Every time Arriba shows the full size image of your image, they are using your bandwidth which can increase the cost of your web hosting bill. Bandwidth should be for the people who actually visit your site, not this kind of search engines who are making a profit off of your images.

So far we have found my images, Sissi from Fantasy Realm, Close Encounters, Doc Geckos, Mars West, and many other sites images are being harvested.

Arriba Vista is putting all the websites they are pulling images from into a very prime position to go over the allotted bandwidth allocation and therefore will be charged more by their web host. We are suggesting that you go to www.arribavista.com (http://www.arribavista.com) and search keywords that you might have in your site.

If you find your images there do two things write to them at: johnz@arribasoft.com and request that your images be removed immediately and that your web site should be placed on the block list so that no further of their search spiders enter and harvest your images. Request for detailed information on how you may prevent any further harvesting by their search spiders.

Then rename your images and upload a graphic that can be displayed instead *G*

Please let your friends who do web building know about this site too.

This site is making money off a lot of peoples hard work and that is wrong.

Just check it out and if your work is there or your friends work is there do not hesitate go into action.
---------------

As a host you can see why I would be upset about a site like this. As a site owner I would expect, at least, this site would need permission before indexing. This is certainly an engine I will be blocking from my own sites providing it follows the robots.txt rule, if not -- then I'll be complaining to their host about it.

Curious if any of you have thoughts about this?

Deb
P.S. This was taken from their very own copyright page!
Remember, respect for individual intellectual property and the laws that protect that property is essential for the Web to remain a truly open resource for all users. When in doubt about materials you want to download, Ask First!! hmmm?

[This message has been edited by Deb (edited 03-18-99).]

[MG Doran]

I find this very disturbing!!!
I went to the site and did a search for jewelry. There were over 4,000 images. It was obvious that many (if not all) are from sites with items for sale.

"This is certainly an engine I will be blocking from my own sites providing it follows the robots.txt rule"
Never paid much attention to the robits.txt file before.
Is this how I would block that? Add this line to the robots.txt file:
Disallow: /directory name/sub-directory name where I put my images/

[Deb]

That would work to prevent all engines from indexing your images dir...

More info can be found at
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html

Deb

[Justin]

I have a feeling that they do not follow the robots rules though http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif Just the very nature of their site tells me that. I have to wonder though, what if a lot of people grouped together and tried to put a stop to this? Or would it be about like trying to stop warez?


------------------
Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Tech Support

[Deb]

Probably a bit of both Justin... stopping it would take some stamina...

The area that would make their life on the net rough would be to have their account cancelled. If FutureQuest received numerous complaints about this site.. and saw what they were doing... we would cancel their account. They are stealing, and that is illegal. But before we would cancel we would try to get them to simply change how they are doing this. What they are doing could be a nice service for many people... but the images they are showing and sites they are spidering need to give them permission! As noted in their own copyright page "Ask First!!!"

I'm sure I will be emailing the site owner to ask him some questions about what he is doing... e.g. benifit of the doubt... but If I were to find this site sucking up the precious bandwidth we have here at FQuest...you betcha I'll be going to their host about it.

Deb

[MG Doran]

Hey Deb,
I changed the robots.txt for all of my sites - might not do the the trick but can't hurt.

I checked stats for all my sites and for my PurpleHaysCDs.com site I found something that makes me uneasy. For top URLs it shows 85% for All_Images. Didn't find this at my other sites.

I don't understand this - does it mean that the site has already had the images indexed by somebody? YIKES!

Would you take a look at the stats for me Deb? I'm feeling very uncomfortable about this - especially since it is a client's site and he paid good money for this work ... http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif

Thanks!
Roxie (aka MG Doran)

------------------

[Jacob Stetser]

Not having seen your other sites, Roxie, I venture two guesses:

#1) You have a lot of different graphics on the site. Are there images for each CD, that sort of thing? Do most of your images repeat over all the pages, or are there many that don't? If so, it could just be that the sheer number of images produces a high hit count, which accounts for all/most of the traffic.

#2) Without more specific stats, such as what sites are referring to what items on your site, it's hard to tell if someone is stealing your graphics. However, if someone takes graphics, their site is listed in the referrer list each time they display your picture from your site. So theoretically, if you're getting a lot of pictures stolen, you should notice some mysteriously high levels of referral activity from sites you don't know.

If that's the case, check first so you don't accidentally accuse someone of stealing your graphics when perhaps they were legitimately sending you a lot of traffic.

I'm fairly sure you're seeing option #1, not #2.. On my site graphics take up 17% of my total hits and they repeat on almost every page after having loaded on the first page (i.e., repeated graphics don't need to be reloaded from the server so don't produce hits)

[NOTE: I just did a sample search. You've got graphics for each CD in there. I'm almost positive the 85% is due to that and not someone using your pictures]

Hope this helps...
Jake

P.S. Man, that's a lot of keywords on that jump page. A note: some search engines ignore pages that auto-refresh. Are you getting good results from that jump page? Is it worth having there?

(Not judging, simply curious http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by Jacob Stetser (edited 03-19-99).]

[Cat]

Here's some stuff to help stop the bandwidth thieving. http://www.darklock.com/webguard/ has a cgi script
and http://hostings.com/wfaq.cgi?q=2.12 (Sorry it's from another server http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif ) has info on a .htaccess thingy that only allows the pictures to be called only from the domains you choose and if any others try to access any file in the directory, you send them to a different page.

Could be fun to design that page http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

And yup, I'm new here (and loving FQ!), Hi Everyone!

[gwlubin]

Dear Cat,

This would not be a solution for someone like me. I have another site(not hosted yet at FQ) which is a graphics-rich ecommerce site with jewellry on it. I get 10's thousands of hits on the graphics per week.

How would I prevent my images being stolen?

BTW, I am a newbie too. Hiya!

/g

[MG Doran]

Jacob,
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I think you are right about #1) and I am greatly relieved.

I had this graphics theft subject on my mind and when I saw the 85% (which I don't recall having seen before) I became alarmed. Didn't find a referring url with heavy usage but at this point I was also wondering - just how many ways are there to steal graphics?

"P.S. Man, that's a lot of keywords on that jump page."
This is text straight from the client. Pros and cons were discussed but he wanted it there anyway. (psssst - he has a buddy that knows all about this internet stuff - I've never asked why HE wasn't hired for this project though).

"Are you getting good results from that jump page? Is it worth having there?"
Can't be sure.
Tried this because its convenient when working with the scripts that I use.
This site hasn't been online very long. The client has so-called "friends" who were submitting it to search engines for him from day one - which obviously did him more harm than good since the site wasn't designed yet!!! Well we had a looooong discussion about this. I'm sure his friends got a crash course on search engines and internet etiquette. Don't mess with somebody elses work!

His well meaning friends sure haven't done him any favors ... http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif

In spite of all of this and only being online a few months he is making sales already though!

Cat - Thanks for the urls you mentioned - I will be checking those out.

gwlubin - I also have a ecommerce jewelry site with photos that I took myself. I'll be spitting fire if they show up somewhere else. If I think I've figured out a good solution for this I will share - I'm sure you will too ... http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif
Thanks everyone!

------------------

[Mandi]

I am sorry if this is an overly-simple question . . . but if this is sorta an automated spidering thing they are doing, would naming lighthouse.gif make it "easier" on them than calling it (for example) dr2w46.gif? Or are they viewing and indexing them by hand? I know renaming graphics is a quickie way to disable bandwith theft, but it doesn't do much to stop a spider from scouring . . .

[Rich]

Two points:

(1) Regarding the RIGHTS to property. Unless you have taken steps to protect (trademark and/or copyright) your work then it is FREE and anyone may use it. Sorry, I don't like this answer either, but it is the way things are. If you have taken these steps, then you may take legal steps against anyone copying them.

(2) Bandwidth stealing. I'm not sure this can be very effectively implemented at the virtual user level, but should be capable of blocking access from an entire domain at the root level?

P.S. On a similar topic. Technically, all the content on a public bulletin board or newsgroup is in the public domain also. If someone wanted to "package" all the material here and publish it in a book, they would have the right too. Although some boards do have a posted copyright notice at the bottom of their pages (like this one does) this protects only the board's content and not that of contributors. (No one can "copyright" material for another person). So, unless every post you make includes a copyright notice by you, it is free game! Interesting, huh?

------------------
Rich

"What time is it in _____?"
www.timezoneconverter.com (http://www.timezoneconverter.com)


[This message has been edited by Rich (edited 03-21-99).]

[Bi4Be]

Now this disturbs me, but not to a very big extent. The images at my site are just my logo's and ads as I try keeping it fast loading.

<my two cents>
I could see why this would disturb most of you though, and I could really see that this would be very threatening to the por*no industry (that part would be good, keeping the world at some sort of morality check. Plus we could do with out that added filth to our already rotten society)
</my two cents>

[Stephen]

I think Rich is propagating a little disinformation regarding RIGHTS here.

Although I'm not an expert on the matter, particularly as it pertains to the copyright laws pertaining to images, I'm pretty sure that the pertinent laws are the same as for literary works. In that case copyright exists for the creator as soon as the work is expressed in tangible form, such as on paper or in a file on your computer.

Placing copyright marks on your work is a way of warning others (reminding others) that the work is copyrighted by you. Whether or not you add those marks, the mere existence of the work (created by you) entitles you to protection under the associated copyright laws pertaining to the type of work you have produced. Never copy another person's work without express permission, unless you're prepared to deal with the possible consequences.

[Armand]

Stephen is right here on the copyright issues. The lack of copyright notice doesn't cause lack of rights as still covered by US law, the Berne Convention and UCC, I do believe. Official copyright registration only increase chance of winning in court and amount you can receive.

[Rich]

[Rich Clarifies Himself]

I'm not a a lawyer so I do not claim to know the specifics of copyright, trademark, and patent laws. All statements made by me are solely my own opinion, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of anyone else I may be associated with.

http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif Having stated the appropriate disclaimer...

There may be some that do not need to worry about this stuff because it doesn't really matter if others "share" things from their site. I have one site that I feel this way about. If that's the case then this needn't be given much thought.

However, those that operate a for-profit site that sells information, graphics, or other items are very much interested in protecting their rights to this information. For these people, it would probably be wise to sit down with an attorney in their town for a one-hour consultation to determine how best to protect their rights. The cost would probably range from about $200-$300.

Having worked for several years in an environment that works hard to protect the intellectual property rights of software developers and mechanical and electrical engineers, I still contend that believing the following will help you protect your rights:

(1) It costs nothing to copyright material, but you can and will probably want to register the copyright if or when you ever need to pursue legal action.

(2) If you neglect (or forget, or didn't have time to, etc.) place a copyright notice on the material before it reaches the public domain then you are SOOL (simply out of luck). The item is free for all to use. You have no rights because you did not take the steps to protect them.

(3) Protecting your rights to copy a document (graphics files are a little trickier) is as simple as placing a copyright notice on your document. The copyright notice may appear with or without the © symbol (although I understand there is some debate about whether its use should be reserved for copyrights that have been registered). Its as simple as:

Copyright 1999 Richard L. Shockney.

[hearts]

okay.. i know i will need to re-read this thread.. but would it be okay just to type here outta pure panic? and then someone could slap me.. and tell me to hush?

GUESS WHAT I FOUND IN MY STATS?

can anyone guess here? does this URL look familiar?

www.arribavista.com/ (http://www.arribavista.com/)

It had some kind of number.. here.. look


http://www.arribavista.com/
Total Total 304's
Requests (NoMod Req) Bytes sent | Referrer URL
---------------------------------------------
1 0.05% 0 0.00% 5076 0.05% | /ShowResult.asp image=5247442
---------------------------------------------

I don't have nothing numbered.. did I become numbered? can anyone explain this.. and when I chill.. i will try reading this thread and see what it is I need to do. Atleast the stats are there.. good job FQ!

I feel so invaded... http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif

Incase this is absolutely nothing, I just needed to whine about it.

[This message has been edited by hearts (edited 03-23-99).]

[Justin]

www.arribavista.com/ShowResult.asp?image=5247442 (http://www.arribavista.com/ShowResult.asp?image=5247442)

If you visit it like that you'll see.... I'd rename the image immediately if it were me.

PS - right clicking on the shown image gives http://www.heartsweb.com/insper/hearts_webring_of_inspirations/hearts_inspirations.jpg as the location....

------------------
Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Tech Support


[This message has been edited by Justin (edited 03-23-99).]

[hearts]

Okay, i hope that the one cuss word i used did not print... if it did, i will come back and edit it out.. any ways, here is the response in which i got from our friends at Ariba!

Funny.. they say that they got it from another site, (which may be very accurate, so what would make a member of my web ring the originator of the graphic as they were advertising, and linked back to me?) duh DUH DUH it seems they could have followed their own advice, and contacted with the originator themselves! THEY SHOULD PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH!

My own personal disclaimer.. I did what I had to do, without causing psycological damage to anyone! http://www.aota.net/ubb/wink.gif

I apologize for any inconvenience.

I have blocked www.heartsweb.com/insper from the Arriba Vista web crawlers.
We did not have any images from this web site.

The image that you found,
http://www.arribavista.com/ShowResult.asp?image=5247442#bottom, was located
on the following site http://pages.prodigy.net/msnipes/DaisyChain.htm. I
have removed image ID 527442.

The following are the procedures for setting up META tag or Robots.TXT to
exclude the Arriba Vista webcrawler. Please let me know if you have any
questions.

Robots.TXT and Meta Tag Procedures

There are two ways to exclude the Arriba Vista (ArribaPacketRat) robot:

Method 1 (the robots meta tag)

The meta tag system is ideal for excluding specific pages or for users who
do not have access to the root directory of the web site and want all robots
excluded the same. The robots meta tag is not fully supported by all
crawlers, but it is supported by Arriba Vista. To exclude Arriba Vista
through this method, place a meta tag in the head of your html document with
the name "robots" and place restrictions in the content space of the meta
tag.

Supported Restrictions:
noindex - Don't index this page
nofollow - Don't follow links off of this page
nomediaindex - Don't index media on this page (Specific to Arriba Vista)

Separate restrictions may be grouped together in one tag as in the following
example.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<title>
</title>
</head>
<body>

For more information about the robots meta tag visit
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/meta-user.html

Method 2 (robots.txt)

This method is the easiest if you have access to the root directory of a web
site and know specific directories you want excluded. According to the
standards for robot exclusion, the robots.txt file MUST be located in the
root directory of a given web site which is difficult for people who don't
have there own domain. For Arriba Vista (http://www.arribavista.com), the
robots.txt file would be located at http://www.arribavista.com/robots.txt.
An example of an invalid robots.txt location is
http://www.arribavista.com/foo/robots.txt. This file would not be looked
at. The contents of the robots.txt file allows for the exclusion of
specific robot(s) or all robots. To exclude all robots from the entire
site the contents of the robots.txt file would be:

# anything on a line after a # sign is ignored
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Excluding only the Arriba Vista robot from the entire site would look like
the following:

User-agent: ArribaPacketRat
Disallow: /

Alternatively, if you only wanted to exclude Arriba Vista from specific
directories, you could add a Disallow line for each directory you don't want
indexed. Arriba
Vista will not index any html or media file included in a disallowed
directory:

User-agent: ArribaPacketRat
Disallow: /foo
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /bar

For more information on robots exclusion look at
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html

In addition to the above methods, please send me a list of URLs on which you
plan to use the Robots exclusion or meta tag method. We must remove them
from our cached robots.txt database.

Thank you,
Whitney McGinnis
Arriba Soft Corporation
Customer Support
support@arribasoft.com


>Subject: Arriba Vista-Support
>Customer Name: Maria
>Customer E-Mail: Hearts@heartsweb.com
>Message:
>
>http://www.arribavista.com/ShowResult.asp?image=5247442#bottom
>in reference to this.. i would like to say that I AM THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS
IMAGE!!!
>http://www.heartsweb.com/insper
>that entire site is copyrighted TO ME. I DEMAND THAT YOU REMOVE THIS.. I am
spreading the word about your site and every time one of my images shows up
here I WILL KNOW.. FUTURE QUEST http://www.futurequest.net is my server and
they provide us with accurate stats! SO EVERY TIME YOU GET THE FRIGGIN nerve
to show, steal one of my images I WILL KNOW. I am posting every forum within
the next 48 hours to inform them about this. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE what
people can do when they ban together!!!!
>
>Now that my server is onto you.. here is proof.. there is an entire thread
talking about you and your stealing at Future Quest.. look for the forums..
then look for open discussion, and then bandwidth theft.. IT IS ALL ABOUT
YOU.
>
>yeah.. i am pissed.



[This message has been edited by hearts (edited 03-23-99).]

[gwlubin]

I have been out of the loop for a couple of days so have missed most of the excitement here.

I am a little unclear on this. Clue me in - what's the difference between the evil of this search engine and good old Yahoo Image Surfer?

Aren't they essentially the same thing?

/g

[Deb]

Yahoo indexes the pics and creates thumbnails of the images. These thumbnails are stored on Yahoo's system and not taken from the site owner's server. If you click on one of the thumbnails you are taken to the web site from which it was indexed.

Arribavista on the other hand will thumbnail the image on the fly and when you click on it to see the full version of the image you remain on arribavista's site while they deliver the image with your bandwidth.

Now the response arribavista gave to Hearts was at least professional response stating that their robot will follow the standard rules utilizing robots.txt. They also agree to remove Heart's site from their indexing. This would be a good thing.

The problem is shown with the image that Hearts found... she has given permission to a site to use her image and her bandwidth... she can not possibly be responsible for all of these sites that are on her web ring making sure arriba isn't indexing any of them.... yet arriba is not being responsible for making sure they have permission from the servers to serve these images. If they were more like Yahoo this wouldn't be a problem as with Yahoo the searcher would need to go to the site to find the image... With arriba the searcher never needs to see the site nor any text (copywrites/credits maybe) that may be by the image before they download it.

Bandwidth and content theft is bad enough w/o sites like arriba assiting to make it worse. I can't say what arriba is trying to do is malicious really... it really is a nice setup... but it encourages theft and it is not responsible in the ways it handles it's services.

When they know enough to advise the searcher to request permission then they should know enough to request permission themself.

tis my ten cents
Deb

[pqwabbit]

aargh! well so far so good none of our images is appearing under various keyword - I'm doing a search on rabbits now actually - and although I havent fond any of our - man alot of these bunnies are extremely familiar to us http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif cuz they appear on other rescue sites or personal sites we're linked to - booo hisss! grrrrr - only a matter of tme beofre they get us (if they havent already - Im not done searchiung!)
thanks for bringing this to our attention man MAHouseRabbit.org has over well 100 images on the server -
son of a .....!!!

how do ya make an angry face in this forum?
> http://www.aota.net/ubb/frown.gif

Lea

------------------
Bunnies make life better.
Massachusetts House Rabbit Society, Inc.
www.MAHouseRabbit.org/ (http://www.MAHouseRabbit.org/)

[This message has been edited by pqwabbit (edited 03-24-99).]

[justme]

Hi, I should have introduced myself a couple of months ago... Steve, don't yet have a place at FQ but intend to.

This url has some interesting info about copyright laws that might be useful. Hope it helps.
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/law/copyright/myths/part1.html