I'm having an increasing problem with 'bandwidth theft'. I wasn't aware of the term until recently, and happily oblivious to what seems to be a widespread problem. I've had to face up to it now, as it's costing me money.

It's rather like someone siphoning petrol from the tank of your vehicle - or at least it appears that way, when my web host's control panel shows me the gauge of my remaining bandwidth, and it's going down rather faster than I expected, and I have to 'fill up' (ie pay more money to the web host) sooner than I expected. To extend the motoring analogy, it's like not only does someone steal your car (in this case, your photo), but they also take your credit card to pay for the petrol.

Different levels of theft

People steal other people's photos all the time, even when they're quite obviously protected by copyright. Unfortunately it seems that intellectual property still isn't seen as property. Or maybe, in the great wonder that is the internet, people just forget that someone else made what they are stealing, and that they ought to provide credit where credit is due.

If someone just wants a photo of a flower, etc, to put on a personal web page, and they copy it, without giving the owner any credit or recognition, it's a breach of copyright rules, and also not morally right, but it happens all the time.

When it really matters

But when people link directly to an image on your server, and pull it off your server independently, to furnish their page, then it's a different thing altogether. Not only are they stealing your intellectual property, but they're making you pay money to provide content for their site.

Website stats show me that it's mainly people with blogs who are taking images from my server, that is, individuals who aren't using the images for profit. These incidents are irritating enough, but it seems to be a case of the people concerned just not knowing that they're causing a problem. We can perhaps blame the hosts of the blogs or forums, who don't make it clear what bandwidth theft is.

It's far less excusable when a profit-making venture is linking directly to your photos. These people should know better. I found that a garden centre with an online store was linking to one of my images directly, as well as stealing images from other sources, including the BBC website.

I haven't contacted them yet by email, but I notice that they seem to have picked up on my first message. Bandwidth thieves are in a vulnerable position, as you control the image on their site - as it lives on your server. It's easy enough to substitute another image for the file they're linking to. Instead of a picture of a daylily, as in this case, you can create an image file of text saying something like 'This company stole my photo', which then shows up on their web page instead.

It seemed to do the trick in this case.

Trying to tackle the problem

At a point in mid-June, when my bandwidth quota had almost run out, and I could see how many people using Ebay, LiveJournal, etc were apparently pulling images off my server, I felt like taking the whole site off the web, rather than keep paying money to support other people's websites as well as my own.

There are a few ways I can try to deal with the problem, and I'm implementing them gradually. It's a gradual process because I resent having to put the time into it, and really don't see why I should. In most cases, education would solve it, as most people don't seem to realise what they're doing.

Recently, I've tried to tackle it by using the .htaccess route, which turned out to be not so frighteningly techie as I feared, thanks to the very clear instructions on a helpful web page: www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml.

Apparently there may be some problems for some users as a result of this - if you're one of the people affected, I apologise for the inconvenience. There are I think other ways of solving the problem of stolen bandwidth, which don't cause these problems for some users, and I might get around to reading more about them and implementing something different.

But I think we can all agree that it would be much better if website owners could concentrate on updating content instead, rather than put time into trying to deter thieves, and that it would be better all round if people using the web respected the property of other web users.

Fern and peony foliage

Above: foliage of fern and peony

Left: foliage of Skimmia 'Kew Green'