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.

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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

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 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.
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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/proje...ts/robots.html

Deb

[Justin]

I have a feeling that they do not follow the robots rules though 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?


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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 ...

Thanks!
Roxie (aka MG Doran)

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[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

[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 ) 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

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 ...

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 ...
Thanks everyone!

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