Is hotlinking legal? Hmm…. yes and no. Some image sites actually allows you to hotlink. Especially Flickr and Photobucket.

But do you know that by hotlinking someone else’s images, you are actually stealing their bandwidth! If the image you hotlinked to is copyrighted, you can be easily traced and can be sued badly. Recently, i’ve learnt a new concept of ‘watermark’.

(Alright, i must confess it’s not actually a new concept. I had been teaching students how to generate watermarks all over the images programmatically, but I only started applying this thingie on my own images recently)

For every image that is hosted at my site, i will place a watermark on it. Why?

Take a look at some of the images of bloggers I admire:

 

It’s not that they are showing off their PhotoShop skills by applying fanciful borders all around their images. It’s their own unique way of watermarking their images so that whoever intends to steal their bandwidth by hotlinking their images, they will be promoting their sites for them indirectly — for free. This is one intelligent way of discouraging hotlinking.

Some of you may wonder, how does one hotlink? Well, you can always view the source of the webpage, and you can probably see codes like:

<img src=“http://www.abc.sg/files/abc.jpg” width=“450″>

Those who wish to hotlink will just use the image URL ‘http://www.abc.sg/files/abc.jpg‘ directly. The image ‘abc.jpg‘ is hosted on the domain www.abc.sg.

So remember, it’s good to watermark all your images in your blog to prevent people from hotlinking them for other uses.

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