PhotoDude.com

Thu. Mar 04, 2004

Making Ugly For Right

Making Ugly For Right – Several years ago, I placed a page on the web about bandwidth thievery: ”There are some evil souls out there who will steal your copyrighted JPEG or GIF, and to add insult to injury, often they will code their page so the graphic is drawn off your server space. In addition to the aggravation, it can cost you money, and in the worst cases, even get your site shut down.”

So I tried to provide some .. relief.

”I’ve created the GIF and a JPEG on this page (hereby declared in the public domain), trying to achieve the perfect balance of gaudy ugliness and small file size while sending the proper message. Download whichever file is appropriate (if you’re lucky, they’re stealing a GIF), and place it on your server space in the exact same place, renamed to match the graphic that was being stolen. E-mail all your friends with the offender’s URL, and see how long it stays up.”

Thanks to an e-mail from someone who had one of their background files ”stolen” in this manner, I got a tremendous laugh from those old files. I never dreamed they would be put to such good usage. Not once, but twice (this won’t last more than a day or two, so here’s screenshot1 and screenshot2 ... unfortunately, not animated like it was on the site).

Thought I’d laugh until I’d die…

UPDATE: It would appear the site owner finally caught on. He’s returned to his thieving ways, but has wised up enough to steal a JPG this time.