You should never steal other peoples bandwidth by linking to images on their website. If you are allowed to use their images on your site the correct way to do it is to copy the image to your site and then put it into your web page.

There have been several occasions where I have found people through my visitor logs who have taken a picture on my site and placed it into their site, myspace page, etc. It’s usually not a big deal and I don’t mind people using my pictures for personal pages, what I object to is them using my bandwidth. Every time someone loads a picture from your site the amount of data that is transferred from my space to their computer is counted against my allotted bandwidth for the month. So someone who has a picture from my site on theirs is “stealing” my bandwidth. Most of the time it’s just a small amount and is not missed, but it’s the principal of the thing to me. Of course if the site is getting millions of visitors or if thousands of people took a picture it could add up to a large chunk (or all) of my allowance, so what I usually do it to rename the picture and change the link to it on my site. Then what the other person has on their site is a box with a little red “x” in it, but other things can go wrong.

What brings all of this to mind is a story about John McCain’s myspace page where some “designer” (who is probably no longer employed there) used a free myspace template for his page. There is nothing wrong there except they gave the designer no credit, which he asked for, what’s worse they used his images which he said not to do and worse yet they linked to the images on the designers site. So rather than just deleting them he changed them. His interesting comments then appeared instantly on McCain’s page. They were taken down pretty fast, but on the Internet once something is out there it will never go away. See for yourself.

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