Hotlinking Is The Devil's Candy, or Why You Shouldn't Hotlink

Recently my spouse and bidness partner Schmutzie wrote an article on copyright and intellectual property and the foul practice known as hotlinking. After a few emails from our readers, we decided to talk a little bit more about hotlinking - and more particularly, why you should never do it. Bottom line: if you read this article and then go hotlink, you will end up in a special hell.



What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking, properly known as inline linking, is the practice of linking to an image or other file from a different server than the one hosting your web page. If done without permission from the author of the web page on which the image or file originally appeared, this is a bad thing. Why?

1) That image is not yours to host. If you’re linking directly to an image on a different server, there’s a good chance that you don’t have the right to display it on your page. If you’re using the image for commercial purposes - ie. trade or endorsement - then you’re probably violating copyright. But for most of us, that’s not the main reason to avoid hotlinking.

2) You’re stealing bandwidth. Every time someone loads your page, his or her browser calls your server and downloads the HTML document. The browser reads the document and then loads elements of the page - video, audio, images, javascript, etc.

The communication between browser and server incurs a cost in bandwidth. If your HTML page on server x tells a browser to go to server y and grab files from there, the bandwidth cost is shouldered by server y. Images, audio and video take up a lot of bandwidth. If your web page gets a lot of hits and you’re hotlinking, then someone else is paying the bill for your popularity. Jerk.

3) It’s a security risk. Chances are that the greatest risk you run when you hotlink is a broken link, when the original server changes file locations or shuts down. But if a server administrator is in a nasty mood, you could find yourself displaying offensive or embarrassing images. In some cases you could even leave your web page open to significant security risks.

Think of a hotlink as a hole that you've opened in your site. Ultimately you have no control over what comes squirming through that hole. It’s that simple.

But my Blogger/Wordpress/etc. blog lets me hotlink to other images. If hotlinking’s so bad, why does it do that?

It’s all the internet’s fault, really. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was designed to allow anyone to link to any page or image, from any server. Unless specific security measures are put in place to prevent linking, you can build a web page that links to multiple servers. Without this functionality, the web would be a very different - and poorer - place.

The linking options in most blog editors reflect this basic HTTP functionality. But unless you have permission to link, don’t do it. In any case, it’s safer to host the images yourself.

But I have a free blog. I don’t have my own server. Do I?

Even though you haven’t purchased a physical server or rented space and bandwidth on one, your blog is hosted on a machine somewhere, and that machine is a server. For example, If you have a Blogger blog, then your blog is hosted on a Google server.

Is embedding a video from YouTube considered hotlinking?

When you embed a YouTube video on your web page, then you’re linking directly to one of their servers, and it’s YouTube (or Google, actually) that pays the cost of the bandwidth. Sounds like hotlinking, yes? The difference in this case is that YouTube is providing the embed code, which means that YouTube is implicitly granting you permission to create an inline link to the hosted content.

Similarly, you can embed images and slideshows from your Flickr site because Yahoo is granting you permission to link directly to its servers.

How do I stop some thieving weasel from hotlinking my images?

If you’re hosting your own site, I recommend that you visit this tutorial on creating an. htaccess file to stop hotlinkers dead in their tracks. If you don’t host your site (ie. you have a free blog) then there’s not much you can do to prevent it - but if you discover it, then you can do the following:

1) contact the hotlinker and request that he or she cease their heinousness;

2) change to the path to your image file by simply renaming the file and then updating your links;

3) replace the hotlinked image with something else - for example, a message that simply says “This site steals bandwidth”.