Content theft is a major pain in the neck with almost every big blog. I have had this blog copied and pasted verbatim several times over the years and always used the good old DMCA method to fight off the thieves

But photographer Neil van Niekerk (who runs the excellent Tangents photography blog) came up with a way more amusing way to fight of those content ripoffs using photos.

Basically he set up his server to serve a different set of photos to his readers and to the infringing site. Here is Neil’s description, which is kinda of an interesting tale:

“Soooooo … I found someone who copied and pasted an entire blog post of mine to her blog. Better yet, she hot-linked to my images. And now … the delicious moment when I swap out the images to porn so that anyone who visits her blog is greeted by some hardcore porn. (I already changed file names on my own site, so I won’t be affected).“

To be perfectly fair, Neil did alert the infringing site on the fact they are infringing on his content and gave them some time to correct their ways.

While using porn is a bit harsh, a similar method with pictures showing a “this content is stolen” tag line will probably work just as well. Here is a picture you can use courtesy of DIYP:

Tangents reader Luke Brookhart adds that you don’t actually have to swap the image, and can hack the site’s .htacess file to serve the same end, with much less work.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.that-jerk-thief-hotlinking-domain.com/ [NC]

RewriteRule \.jpg$ http://www.neilvn.com/goaway.jpg [R,L]

lead photo by Nanagyei.

[Fighting Content Thieves With Photos | Neil van Niekerk]