ImageShack: How not to do it

I was looking through my log files lately trying to get a better handle on who’s linking to what lately. I consider it to be rather rude when people directly to my images, but I like it when people actually link back to where they found images, so I distribute emailed corrections by hand instead of running some sort of “image stealing prevention script”.

People really like certain images of mine as their MySpace backgrounds, so most of the time I have to send out a myspace message or two when I look through the logs. Today I noticed “ImageShack Image Fetcher 1.0” as a client type. I got curious and took a look.

ImageShack is an online picture hosting service that does an awful good job of being easy to use. Without needing to even create an account you can upload pictures, so I’m sure it’s a great way for people to send files via email to each other. I’m impressed that they managed to streamline the interface so well. It’s useful.

However, unlike many truly useful disruptive services, I’ve got some issues with them. The Wayback Machine, for example, stores old copies of webpages. Some might call that copyright violation. However, the Wayback Machine provides a way for sites to prevent it from spidering their site. Furthermore, a link is always maintained to the site from which the content was copied from. This is a good thing.

Now, people should know that I’m a big believer that the “Intellectual Property” system is a fair exchange. A brilliant idea, a piece of music, a photograph… these are all things that are not tangible possessions. In fact, their value to society increases as they are duplicated. I’m sure that 200 years from now, there will still be at least a few Motley Crue CDs intact that somebody can scan, process, and draw conclusions about the way life was in the eighties, whereas it’s not so likely that the musician who records an album but keeps it to themself will be found. The idea of DRM gives me the shudders.

So, making complaints about ImageShack in this way is not something I take lightly. Were I to be Harlan Ellison, I’d have filed a big fat lawsuit already. Were I to be the RIAA, I’d probably suggest something even more dumb.

But, the simple truth is that ImageShack isn’t friendly to the people who put their content on the ‘net. As such, I’ve blocked the ImageShack fetcher for the time being.

ImageShack doesn’t need to do much to make their site creator-friendly. They do not obey the robots.txt file, which prevents me, the site owner from blocking the fetcher. They could put somewhere visible in the HTTP request (I’d suggest the HTTP_REFERER field) where the image is to be stored on their site, which would allow the me, the site owner to see what the image is being used for and issue an applicable takedown request. Neither of these features requires much effort. Optionally, they could provide a way for me to specify that it’s OK for ImageShack to store my images, as long as they track backwards where the image came from.

It pains me to do so, because I can see many many good reasons why somebody would want to use ImageShack to store my images, but I decided that I don’t want ImageShack fetching images from my site the way they are currently doing things.