The Wardman Wire

Mike Power over at “Mike Power’s Website - Not a Blog” (He is right - it is not a blog as you cannot comment, so I’ll do it here has commented on my article Acknowledging an Apology: Blog Leeching, featured in this week’s Britblog Review. He makes some excellent points:

I get a little pissed off when people throw around the term ‘theft’, as in ‘image theft’ or ‘bandwidth theft’ because in most cases the person complaining has actually lost nothing at all.

I get a little pissed off too, which is why I didn’t use the term “theft” anywhere in the three articles I wrote about it…

With over 4,500 gigs of bandwidth available for my image hosting (increasing by 16 gigs every week) the leeching of a 20kb image isn’t going to cause me sleepless nights … Even if I did pay for bandwidth like I pay for my electricity the cost to me of 10,000 image calls would be a massive 2 pence.

That sounds as if Mike is on Dreamhost. I can recommend them if you can cope with a service that is not quite as reliable as the best. Very good for starters - or if you are stuck on a Blogger domain.

My approach is that I would block direct linking, except to particular directories set aside for public files.

However, I come partly from a podcasting background, and “podcast leeching” created havoc in 2004 and 2005. If Mike’s 10,000 calls were to a 20Mb podcast or a 50Mb videopodcast then even Dreamhost would charge him a lot extra (at $1 per Gigabyte).

Leeched by the Daily Kos

One case I looked at was not a mere 10,000 image calls - it was the Daily Kos leeching from Joe Schmidt, which receives a mere 1,000,000 pageviews each day. In that case the leeching absorbed half the bandwidth of the entire site.

So, my approach is to run as tight a ship as is practicable.

Of course, in return for the leeching the “leeched” site obtains a free advert for however long it lasts.

It might be polite to ask before hotlinking but, frankly, I am not about to call you a thief if you do it.

Neither am I - but I will be a good deal less tolerant when the site making the mistake belongs to an Internet Security Company, who should know better, and when the published article does not contain a link back to acknowledge the source.

Tags: image leeching, daily kos, mike power, bandwidth theft[tags]image leeching, daily kos, mike power, bandwidth theft[/tags]