Fast Fiction

I’ve been writing notes to MySpace for several months to stop people from hotlinking to my photos.

It’s not a huge request ... but one that should at some point be acknowledged. I’ve written four notes to them through their online contact info pages and I don’t even get a confirmation email that they’ve recieved my note. If anyone knows an email address that I can use for these notes in the future, I’d appreciate a heads up.

So here’s my problem: so far in the month of July I’ve had 35,000 MySpace hotlinking hits on my domain.

Apparently they like my photos. Not so much my blog ... just my photos.

Even though I have htaccess limits in place, it’s still a drain on my bandwidth, something that I pay for.

MySpace has it well within their coding powers to keep their users from unauthorized hotlinking. It’d be very simple for them to set up a blacklist (that would be populated by the domain owners requests) that would swap the requested image for something that says “please only link to images you have the rights to.”

But no.

Here’s a scenario that could probably get them to change their minds:

Buy a domain and populate it with 200 fantastic and highly-desirable photos for hotlinking. Code the page to make them super-easy to find with Google Image searches. Cute kittens, candy, pretty rainbows ... blah, blah.

Let the MySpacers link away.

When you reach a threshold, then do an htaccess swap and have all the images changed to an image that violates the Terms of Use for MySpace. (Use your imagination ... there are lots of things that would qualify.)

Continue as needed until MySpace gets the message that allowing hotlinking is not only bad for the people who are paying for all the hotlinking - it’s also bad for MySpace.

If you want to hear what MySpace has been spending their time doing instead ... well, you know, it’s all over the news.