Beware of people stealing your site graphics!

I was doing a little searching around my webhost and noticed something that grabbed my attention.

Apparently a little sh*t weasel is so so cheap that he can't even come up with enough money to host his own graphics, so he decided to steal mine.

Am I ticked? Actually, right now I am more "tickled" than ticked.

Let me explain in detail what is going on and why I'm laughing right now...

You see, these graphics weren't simply right-clicked, saved, and hosted elsewhere. These graphics are being hosted on my own website and are being used on someone elses sales letter on a different (FREE) website.

Although these two little graphics are very small (one being an invisible spacer and the other being a miniture checkmark), I think it is very wrong for someone to highjack my bandwidth (no matter what size the files are), so I did something about it!

Here's where the fun comes in and why I am laughing my ever-lovin' arse off right now!

I took these two images and changed them so they are an embarrasement to the little sh*tweasle that stole them.

Instead of an invisible spacer and checkmarks on this guys salesletter, he's got a little surprise for all the world to see.

Here's the "before" screen shot of the salesletter:



And here's the effects after I changed my pic files (this is a close-up):



And here's the link where my graphics were changed on this guy's sales letter:
Homeowners, Are Your Money Problems Keeping You Up All Night?

(Does this craigslist-posted mortgage sales letter look familiar?)

Sure it took some of my time in doing this, but I want my message to ring true and clear that if you little sh*t weasel theives wanna play games with my stuff... then let's play.

I don't know how long he will keep this page up (since he will surely read this in a couple of hours, since he started pikin' his sales letter on this board a couple of weeks ago), but I thought some of you should know about this.

Am I wrong in doing this? Could I get into legal trouble by doing this?

In my opinion... HECK NO!

They're my graphics hosted on "MY" website and I can do whatever I want with them, right?

My suggestion to you other folks here that own websites... go to your host stats and see if any of your graphics are being highjacked by theives!

Question:
How do you feel about stealing graphics from someone elses server?

Do you think I'm going overboard with my graphic-changing tactics?

Little sh*t weasel...I kinda like that!

Dale King

Nice going Steve. See, I would have changed the bullet graphic to 3 little words "I'm a loser" over and over again down his page.

I would have a found a graphic of a little hand with the middle finger raised. (It's not too late to change it, Stephen!)

Believe it or not, I got this idea after reading a comment Dale made to a post this afternoon... Thanks Dale!

Mr Subtle, specifically I found this by going to the web/ftp stats area of my control panel (as Dale mentioned), then clickling on "latest visitors".

From there you can see if your graphics are being pulled from your website or someone elses. You can also see if spiders are grabing your "robots.txt" and a bunch of other cool stuff.

The only reason I couldn't do more was because he is using a specific size on this graphic (the size of my original checkmark), so I had to stay within these perimeters... Orginally I was going to say something like "this graphic was stolen from Blah, blah, blah!" or I was going to create a text graphic that would change his wording.

Something like... "If you're too stupid to..." (then his bullet would say), "pay off credit card debts", etc...

By the way folks, sorry if your offended by the SW remarks... I know it's a bit unprofessional, but if Halbert can get away with it...

Are you kidding, Stephen?

Stacked up against some of my infamous rants, you're a boy scout by comparison.

By the way, Vin, you'll be happy to know, "that" Dale is gone forever!

Oh yeah, thanks for giving me credit for that Cpanel idea, Stephen.

Dale King

THAT is fargin hilarious!

Indeedy, a little bit of .htaccess trickery can inspire a whole afternoon of fun ... thereby allowing you to keep using your images w/o changes to your own pages, but loading totally evil stuff on any image called by a particular referrer... oh the tormet I have unleashed on my own SW's! *giggle*

Those who host on a cPanel server, you should have a feature available to you called "hotlink protection." If you enable this, the bandwidth thief will get those dreaded broken-image red X's on their pages.

No, it's not nearly as fun as evil graphics, but it does protect your bandwidth bill.

Bailey