Image Theft As Viral Strategy
Posted: December 14th, 2008 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising, Miconian At Large | Tags: Benjamin Button, trailers undone | CommentsOver at Trailers Undone, I sometimes post screenshots that I take from movie trailers. I did this with The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, because the studio hadn’t yet released an English version of the trailer, and it was aggressively shutting down the Italian versions that were getting posted to YouTube.
Cut to some weeks later, and I’m looking through my referral log. The following sites are all using my Benjamin Button screenshot, along with my bandwidth, linking directly to the image on my server, yet not acknowledging in any other way that Trailers Undone even exists:
There was a third, IM, but after I called them out on it, they started linking to the image somewhere else (still not hosting it themselves). Come on, I thought. How big is this file, 3k?
I felt dissed. These other blogs, all of which are surely getting more traffic than mine, were using my bandwidth… to a tiny degree, but it felt as if someone had deliberately knocked against me in the street. It’s not a big deal, but why bother doing it?
Eventually, I realized that it’s not about the bandwidth at all. I had posted an image from a trailer that the studio was trying to suppress. By posting it, I was theoretically opening myself up to legal action, or something. So these other blogs link to my image and avoid the accusation that they themselves are involved in whatever shenanigans I’d gotten up to. Actually, that may not be the real reason, but it’s the best I could think of.
I considered a couple of retaliations:
a) Preventing the image from loading for requests that come with a referrer URL of the sites in question.
b) Renaming the image for my own use, and then posting another image with the original filename, so that it would suddenly show up on other blogs where the Benjamin Button screenshot had previously appeared. This message could be something angry or obscene, or an explanation of what had happened, or simply an ad for my own blog.
However, I decided not to do any of those things. Here’s why:
Each day, the majority of “pageviews” are actually views of my images on other blogs. But not all of them. Some users who see the image on other blogs actually notice on mouse-over that it belongs somewhere else, and then they decide to do a little exploring on Trailers Undone.
This situation hasn’t hurt the Google pagerank either. Here’s the first page of image searchs for “Benjamin Button”:
You know, the lengths people go to to try and game the network continue to astound me. I’m curious as a non-coder sort as to how linking to an image — which appears on your site anyway but may not be hosted there — protects a user from an IP theft claim any more than posted the image and linking to one’s own server.
Ah, but I digress. The real issue I see is people not being real — by either presenting ideas that are not their own (see recent pay-per-post debates re Kmart) or presenting linking structures that are not valid (see all the SEO and PPP gambits to try to make a topic look more relevant than it is). Everyone is so hung up on mirrored faces or mirrored links that they are missing the real value of the new social media — a forum to build and exchange real ideas.
Sorry for the soapbox mate. Hey, at less their manipulation is giving your images a higher page rank.
Update, I recently called out someone using my images, and he told me leaving the images on my server was his way of giving me credit.