[Commons-l] Where to report hotlinking?

[Brion Vibber]

On 8/6/09 11:20 AM, Rayson Ho wrote:
> I found sites hotlinking photos on Wikimedia... is there a place that
> I can report them??

We strongly encourage reuse of our materials, and we don't mind hotlinking.

The nature of the web itself is very pro-linking; "hotlinking" is the 
natural way to use an image on the web that exists in a stable location. 
IMO hotlinking-phobia is mostly due to smaller sites discovering that a 
large chunk of their bandwidth is being taken up by somebody else using 
their image that they didn't want to be reused in the first place... 
which is not the case we find ourselves in! :)

If we do find particularly egregious abuse we might poke an exception 
for technical reasons, but that'll be something we'd do behind the 
scenes. There's no need to report or try to shut down general hotlinking 
of images from Commons, Wikipedia etc.

-- brion