Last week I wrote a post about the NCAA and I posted a picture of the NCAA logo. Unfortunately someone changed the picture to a pornographic picture. Sorry for anyone who saw it. Thanks to a friend who just called and told me. I can’t believe how low people will stoop.


Yikes.
Thankfully, I didn’t see it, but I doubt it was intended as spam but rather more likely to “teach you a lesson.” Sometimes people get annoyed when you use photos hosted on their web servers in your web page (as opposed to hosting the images directly on your web server). By doing so, you’re basically “stealing” their web server bandwidth for the benefit of your web site. That’s not really polite. They “teach you a lesson” by changing the image you originally linked to porn instead.
It’s a bit of a dilemma. If you host the image on your site but don’t own the copyright (or it isn’t public domain), then you’re violating copyright. If you link to the image on their server, you may not be violating copyright but you are stealing their bandwidth.
So, I suppose the best practice is to only use public domain images (or images whose copyright you own) that you can host on your own server..and/or only link to images from external sources that you’re sure don’t mind you doing so. Otherwise, using images linked from someone else’s web site creates the risk of this happening again.
Jonathan,
Thanks for that info, I had never considered it and will attempt to change my practice to that!!
However, I have gotten ads for sexual items in my comments, and had to delete them!
yuck.