How to Tell if Someone is Stealing
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The ease of saving images off of the web has caused a very
real problem for artists and content providers alike. If
you have placed your intellectual property on the web chances
are that sooner or later someone is going to 'borrow' a little
bit of it... without your permission.
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How to Tell If Someone is Stealing Graphics
Now that you know it's
possible for someone to filch your bandwidth as well as your graphics,
you're probably wondering how to tell if they have just taken your
graphic or if they are linking directly to your server. A quick check of
their source code will give you your answer. Look for the <img src=
tag. If your URL is there rather than a relative or absolute URL to their
own files, then they are linked to your site. You will also want to check
the BASE tag as it is possible to use your URL in their BASE to
draw the picture over to their site as long as they use absolute URLs to
their own site inside the body of their HTML file. In a case like that,
you would see the relative URL in the body of the file, assume it went to
their server and never be the wiser.
Suppose you haven't accidentally stumbled over your graphic on
someone else's web site, but you'd like to know if anyone out there in
cyber-space is linking directly to your images. Visiting 50 million web
sites would be out of the question, but there's an easier way. Using
Alta Vista, you can do a
specialized search for graphics linked directly to your server.
If you don't have your own domain type in:
image: domain.com/~yoursite
If you do have your own domain type in:
image: yourdomain.com/
You can eliminate images from your own and mirror sites by adding
"-yourdomain.com" or "-domain.com/~yoursite", minus the quotes. For example,
to do a search for images linked directly to the WDVL servers, I would type
in the following string:
image:www.stars.com -url:www.stars.com -url:www.wdvl.com
While the
Alta Vista search method is not 100% accurate, giving different results on
occasion, it will at least give you a starting point.
Lycos lets you search for
pictures so if your image has an unusual name you might find copies.
A third approach would be to use referer logs to track down bandwidth
theft. A Perl script can be used to scan the log file for accesses to local
images from pages outside your own domain. A quick visit to
The Virtual Library of
WWW Development: CGI
will lead you to many script resources including LakeWeb's Perl Scripts where you will find
a ready made script available for download.
Purloining and Pilfering - Introduction
Purloining and Pilfering
Why Steal?
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