There is stupidity, and then there is STUPIDITY, and the concept that someone could sue you for removing images from your own site surely falls under the latter.

According to TechDirt, a man deleted his website and removed all of his images.  He received an email shortly after this from a man who had been using his images on his own site and he was demanding that the man who had deleted the images put them back up immediately or face legal action.  If you aren’t 100% sure what is hotlinking and what isn’t, here is what I said in a previous post:

…if you embed an image, say on MySpace, that you did not upload yourself to a server, than you are hotlinking that person’s file.  While this may not sound like a big deal, every time that file, usually an image, is displayed somewhere, that uses up a portion of that person’s bandwidth.  As bandwidth is not free, you could potentially be costing that person money by using their image without their permission.

This is considered one of the worst practices on the Internet, but it is something that goes on daily still.  Now, the person who posted the image has the right to do whatever they want with it, and for someone to say they don’t have that right is a whole new level in hotlinking scumminess that I never even dreamed possible.  If you go over to ShapelessMass.com you can see the original emails that were exchanged, and that he did finally convince the indivirual hotlinking him that he would not win in court, and the person finally dropped the whole situation and apologized.

Now, what really amazed me about this whole thing is that the guy who was doing the hotlinking the images said they were important to his business, and he needed those images to help promote himself.  I demonstrated in another post about hotlinking how the practice leaves you with no control over the image.  As I have done on occassions where people hotlinked me, the person who controls the image can replace that image with something completely unrelated, and so long as the files have the same name, the image you use for the replacement will be displayed.  To be blunt, I once changed a picture on my personal website of an Xbox video game system to a picture of a sex toy after a guy in Mexico kept hotlinking me for months.  So whenever someone came in to his auctions they were greeted by this image of a well known sex toy with the words “Wouldn’t you enjoy this more than an Xbox?” written on it.  Childish of me?  Yes.  Considering the amount of bandwidth the man was stealing from me, I didn’t care.

I have seen people try to defend hotlinking as nothing bad, and that it isn’t stealing, but I’m afraid that it actually is.  When I owned my retail store, we had a dumpster out in the back alley that people constantly would throw their garbage in.  One day, after I couldn’t put my trash in it due to other people using it, I put on gloves and dug through it for a name and address so I could yell at someone.  I found a name and called the police to see if there was anything that could be done about it, and they sent an officer over immediately because it turns out there actually IS a problem with it.  I was informed that this qualified as “theft of services”.  The concept is that if you pay for a service, and someone else uses that service without asking your permission, or paying for the right, that they are stealing the service from you.

Guess what, folks… using another person’s bandwidth is stealing a service from them no matter how you slice it.

In short, don’t do it, and if you insist on doing it, don’t yell at the person who owns the image if they should happen to change it!

Thanks to Steven Hodson for pointing this story out to me.