[thelist] Staving Off Photo Thieves

Paola Kathuria paola at limitless.co.uk
Sat Apr 28 07:45:56 CDT 2001


I've read this whole thread so far and so will try to write
mostly new stuff.

Besides people taking images from web sites directly, I think
that a greater problem is 1) search engines which allow people
to search for images on the web and 2) robots which specifically
copy images from sites.

No matter what warnings or copyright notices you may have on
your pages holding your images, such spiders and robots will
still index and copy your images to be used by others (who
won't know where they came from).

See:
- http://web.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&stype=simage
- http://www.lycos.co.uk/search/options.html
- http://www.hotbot.lycos.co.uk/
- http://www.excite.com/

I use a number of low-tech solutions - none of them are
fool-proof but, besides a way of reminding the human visitor
that someone owns the images, they are intended to also thwart
the indexing and copying of images by search engines and
robots.

1) Include a copyright/ownership notice and site URL on certain
   images (e.g., http://www.biwhm.org.uk/images/99-47.jpg)

2) split photos into quarters (if the same height, you don't
   have to use tables to reassemble them onto the page) mostly
   to thwart spiders/robots but also to make it more work for
   human thieves (e.g., http://www.scottstudio.co.uk/people-1.html
   includes  http://www.scottstudio.co.uk/images/p-peop-1a.jpg)

3) use robots.txt to instruct robots to ignore your images
   or photos directory (although note that most robots/spiders
   ignore robots.txt, because most spiders aren't for legit
   search engines).

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /photos/

4) Include meta tags on the page to instruct robots not to index
   the page with the pics: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

5) Use the Apache rewrite condition to disallow accesses directly
   to images unless viewed via your web page (this stops anyone/anything
   accessing images unless via the web page they're included on).

   See http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC38

   (Careful that you know what variations the domain will
    appear as in the referrer when constructing the rule.)

6) Notify the copier, if you know who it is - perhaps they believe
   the myth that everything on the web is in the public domain and
   is thus up for grabs.  A short polite letter informing them that
   your stuff is copyright can often suffice.  It's worked for me
   on  occassion.

7) Include a flaw in images that's not visible by the naked eye
   (same goes for copy - e.g., replace a few capital oh's with zeros)
   - it just makes it easier to demonstrate that it was your image
   that was copied.


Paola





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