Stopping bandwidth theft through image hotlinking with .htaccess
These days, even cheap shared web hosting tends to offer unlimited bandwidth so the practice of stealing bandwidth by hotlinking to images isn’t as detrimental as it was in the past, but there’s still the principle involved. In short, having your work stolen is one thing, being forced to host the stolen work while someone else grabs the benefits is something else altogether.
For instance, there are more than 70 different wallpaper images, each available in several different dimensions, at the Aston Villa Wallpaper mini-site. I don’t have any real issue with people taking them and re-distributing them, most won’t go to the trouble of cropping the site identification.
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