A little help?

[Katem]

Hi there,

I've noticed over the past month I've been having hotlinking coming from the Yahoo group hot_horny_men the owner doesn't seem to care and Yahoo don't either.

Now what this man is doing seems wrong to me, putting up so much free content for his 5384 members and running the blog menlover.blogspot.com which links to rapidshare files of photosets and videos. I struggled to find sponsor links.

So I thought perhaps one of you guys may be running the group or know of the owner. What can be done to prevent content being stolen? I'm in this to make money, like everybody else..The 'free porn' comes second.

I've changed my htaccess to tackle the hotlinking but are groups like this even legal?

Thanks and sorry to start posting on such a depressing note!

[basschick]

is your .htaccess preventing the hotlinking? if so, move on and if not, there are ways to contact yahoo but they are a pain in the ass. a c&d would probably be in order here, too.

[Katem]

Yes my htaccess is now preventing hotlinking.

I contacted Yahoo, who said they'd deal with the group but could not tell me the outcome of what happened..Nothing appears to have happened!

The group has a LOT of pictures and I'm confident that they DONT own the lisences or have permission to post them. With it being such a large group, I expected it to be quite well known, perhaps ran by one of the gay webmasters?

C&D? wow...I'd have little idea how to go about that! I have a lawyer available but never really thought I'd need to use his services much.

Thankyou for the feedback.

[basschick]

yahoo moves very slowly as do all the corporate giants of the web. in any event, if your content is protected and you let other webmasters know about this hotlinking jerk, i think you done good

lots of webmasters keep a copy of a c&d around - it's unfortunately not rare in our business to need 'em.