Hotlinking Images is Rude

I just watched nearly all of my blog’s bandwidth be consumed in a matter of hours. Someone decided to take a funny GIF image that I had hosted here and link directly to it on their site. Thousands of visitors (to their site, not mine) later, I was getting warnings from my host.

I’m not talking about image ownership. I didn’t create it, and I have no idea who did; But a copy of it does sit on my server, and I pay every time someone downloads it from there.

If you choose to leech an image off someone else’s site instead of hosting it yourself, beware – You leave the content on your site open to whatever the image owner or host decides to replace it with.

An awful lot of sites and blogs on the web will now find the clip of Zefram Cochrane they so thoughfully leeched off my blog replaced with something… else.

Thanks for the laugh, guys. But one question: What’s a “PAWG,” anyway?