Pronet Advertising advises you to “Protect Your Site’s Content” and they give a plug to a $200 tool that helps those poor souls using IIS as their web server. If you’re running the open source apache web server, here’s a free solution I worked out after many MySpace users starting embedding funny photos from PlanetMike.com into their web pages:

1. Create an image to send to people that attempt to leech your images. you could be rude or mean, but I simply put up an ad for my own web site. Keep it as small as you can, since it may be used a lot. My photo is at http://www.planetmike.com/images/no-hot/linking.jpg.
2. Ideally, put this into a directory block in your httpd settings file. Or you can put it into your .htaccess file.

   RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/images/no-hot/linking\.jpg$RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?planetmike.com/ [NC]RewriteRule \.(jpe?g)$ /images/no-hot/linking.jpg [L]RewriteEngine off

   Line 2 is the image you want people to see (your ad or nasty note).

   Line 3 allows normal images to be sent to people who don’t send a referrer.

   Change line 4 to be your domain name. This domain will be allowed.

   Line 5 changes what image is sent on image requests. If a jpg is requested send the replacement image.

3. Restart your web server and test.

That’s all there is to it. Definitely let me know if you have problem with this.

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