I've found a few ebay sellers hotlinking to images on my sites - and normally I wouldn't care - but some of them have crossed the line and have stolen my text too. I don't really mind if people are hotlinking pics on their personal blogs etc... but if I find some jerk blatantly stealing pics AND text from me, it gives me a kick to serve them up a nasty image using htaccess and to see how long it takes for them to notice. Other than going through my site stats, is there any other way to search for sites that are hotlinking my images?
seems like there was a thread about this not too long ago...can't find it now though edit: here we go! http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=162051&highlight=hotlinking
the only reliable way I know of is access_log files since i get many ten thousand hotlinked pics and wallpapers/month instead of serving anything nasty - I dediced to serve a nice promo banner from my site since hotlinkers are using up your site's resources anyway - even if you replace the pics you still get a log entry for each hotlink ... at least you may get some real traffic in exchange for the hotlinking if you have a nice animated promo banner about your site's content. if hotlinking fro a single source ( domain ) becomes a major problem, then you may go top level and contanct owner of that site - i did so exactly one year ago with msn hotlinking some 50k pics and wallpapers per months - it took a few mails - some 2-3 weeks - to msn legal dept and now all hotlinking stopped at once. hotlink prevention from msn top level server admin. if ebay is a key hotlinker - contact ebay in a friendly but firm way and have solid evidence mailed to them. as site owner ebay is the final level legally liable for copyright infringements of that kind.