Magic the Gathering

It was brought to my atten­tion today that a num­ber of sites were steal­ing our graph­ics and includ­ing them in their pages, not even down­load­ing them and just dis­play­ing them pulled directly from the Man­a­Na­tion server. It is frus­trat­ing already when images are stolen from Man­a­Na­tion with­out any attri­bu­tion or back­links, but to also cost us money by ‘hotlink­ing’ our images is even more of an insult. I can attribute some to user naivety but the major­ity of the instances I’m refer­ring to are other site man­agers will­fully steal­ing and using to their own benefit.

Today we’ve enabled hotlink pro­tec­tion, so that if you try to dis­play the image from our server on yours, it will instead dis­play either a bro­ken image or an image explain­ing that this image has been hotlinked from mananation.com.

I can’t do much to stop peo­ple steal­ing and redis­trib­ut­ing our images as their own, I hate water­mark­ing and don’t want to do that but I may have to. I’ve held off doing that, but I fear the time is com­ing soon.

I apol­o­gize to those blog­gers and forum users who now have posts with bad images, I hate pun­ish­ing users who don’t know any bet­ter, but I have to pro­tect Man­a­Na­tion and try to keep costs down.

– Trick

1. no need to apol­o­gize. We all under­stand. pro­tect the brand.

   Mtgxman | December 15, 2009, 11:55 am | #

2. You’re sup­posed to have one of those clever “pun­ish­ment” images when some­one tries to hotlink.

   For­get explain­ing why, just make someone’s web­site dis­play con­tent that they’d never want to.

   redsai | December 15, 2009, 6:10 pm | #

Additional comments powered by BackType