I don’t do Czech advertisements

Back in January I had an issue with someone stealing my images off my server and using them on their own site, which is a problem for several reasons. First, it’s stealing my intellectual property. Second, it was stealing my bandwidth. Third, they didn’t even give me credit for the pictures I took. That was the metaphorical final straw and I moved servers so that I could add a file in the background of my site that makes it so that any image that someone tries to hotlink will be replaced with another image I designed that advertises this wonderful site. (It’s also stopped google image search from finding me, which is perfectly fine by me, there are some weird people out there looking up some odd images.)

I’d already taken steps at the end of last year to reduce that as much as possible by making pretty much every photo on the site small enough that taking it to use for something else wouldn’t really be worth it. There have been a few exceptions, but that’s why my photos are the size they are. It also helps me to have everything more uniform.

A week ago I took yet another step to help protect my pictures. I started adding a watermark to them. That took several days. I have a LOT of pictures here. With rare exceptions the photos on this site were taken by me. I’d say that 99% of the graphics are from Print Shop, which I own, and because I own it I can use their graphics for my own purposes as long as I don’t make money off them (I’m not making any money here, at all, but it’s also not my most expensive hobby, so it’s good). I’ve started drawing a few of my own simple graphics too, we’ll see how that goes. Watch for some of them to show up as smiley options.

All of this seemed worthwhile when I read about a family in St. Louis who’s Christmas card ended up as an advertisement in a Czech grocery store. It’s all been cleared up now, and it’s kind of funny, but it also shows that the internet can be a very weird place at times.