Today’s penalty for hotlinking (look it up, Representative Patterson!) is a very mild image swap. I could have used goatse or put up a message saying “my hard drive is full of child porn,” or something else really politically harmful but I restricted myself to a GOP endorsement and support for Arizona’s excellent new immigration law on this Democratic State Representative’s blog.
How long do you think it will take until he figures it out?
Update: I checked the site again at 7:45 p.m and he finally stopped hotlinking my image. But evidently Rep. Patterson’s sense of entitlement over other people’s images and bandwidth has not been deterred at all. He started hotlinking, of all people, Angry White Dude. I mean, would you hotlink someone with a name like that? I wouldn’t. AWD looks like a good blog, I just added it to my RSS reader. And for what it’s worth, the Dude disagrees with Rep. Patterson pretty emphatically re: SB1070. I await further developments.
Also – yes, I’m certainly aware I can stop hotlinking at the server level. I choose not to, because I have a few images in the archives that I allow people to hotlink. When the image changes, we can change it in one place for a whole bunch of websites at once. But that doesn’t mean every yahoo out there is entitled to use the bandwidth for which I’m paying. It’s discourteous, and reveals a sense of entitlement that really does offend me, which is why I so thoroughly enjoyed watching the FRC spank Max Blumenthal (1, 2) for the same thing – coincidentally, three years ago today. Is May 3rd National Liberals Stealing Bandwidth Day or something? And no, public shaming had no effect on Blumenthal, either. Go figure.
Haha! Nice! (But I’d have still gone for the kiddie porn angle–they would.)