Preventing sound 'borrowing' - How?

Hirgon · Post by **Hirgon** » Fri Apr 11, 2003 12:21 pm

Please DO NOT directly link to any of these files. To use on your own web site, livejournal, neopets or other personal space upload to your own server, along with a link back to AudibleBeauty.net. Thank you!!!

Hi there!

I apologise for being a bit nosey, but I was wondering: does the above request actually work effectively? If not, do you just shrug and live with it, or do you have some other tricks to stop people 'borrowing' your sounds?

The reason I ask is that my own LOTR music page is getting repeatedly hammered by the likes of 'member only' Neopets pages, and I was wondering if you knew any effective ways to stop this from happening :p

Congratulations on a great site

Cheers,

Hirgon

Post by **Gina** » Fri Apr 11, 2003 5:46 pm

Yep gotta love the Neopets (not) :O

Out of absolute curiosity I actually joined to see what all the fuss was about and discovered that their own help pages explain how to "borrow"--as you put it--sounds and music from other pages. In writing it they probably meant use one's own site but most people obviously do not. So far as I have been able to research there's no real way to stop people from using links like they often do in the popular "bgsound" code.

You can play around with some server attributes if you have access to stop a simple link on another page (do a search for "htaccess" in relation to image hotlinking).

So far I have tried to contact the worst offenders and gently ask them to stop (many have no idea what they are doing actually). Obviously I cannot control what happens after someone downloads a sound to their hard drive--besides I don't really own this stuff anyway, the original copyright holders do--I just wish to prevent shut down due to bandwidth being exceeded.

Hirgon · Post by **Hirgon** » Sat Apr 12, 2003 7:51 am

Hi there, thanks for the reply

Yep, gotta love Neopets - responsible for well over 50% of all the downloads of 'The Passing Of The Elves' over the past month or two :p

I have actually tried the .htaccess link-blocking thing, but unfortunately it seems that my webspace doesn't support it (it's running the wrong type of web-server software, or something like that...). *shrug* I suppose I'll just have to do the same as you and politely ask them to stop if it gets out of hand. (Although some of the offending pages seem to be German - don't know quite how I'm going to ask them to stop :p)

I suppose as a last resort I could always stick the files into ZIP archives or something - that would at least stop sites using them as background music, at the cost of making them less accessable to some people.

Obviously I cannot control what happens after someone downloads a sound to their hard drive--besides I don't really own this stuff anyway, the original copyright holders do--I just wish to prevent shut down due to bandwidth being exceeded.

Totally agree

As for "borrowing", I'm reluctant to use a word like 'theft' or 'stealing' as, like you say, many probably don't realise they're doing anything wrong.

Cheers,

Hirgon

Post by **Gina** » Sat Apr 12, 2003 11:48 am

Saw this once and might try it myself. Files are actually music files (ending with probably .mp3) however their name ends with .zip. When someones downloads - Save Target As - they simply rename the file back to .mp3. Prevent direct linking but prevent annoying others (well I tend to at other sites) of having to unzip everything before one listens to it.

Gina

Hirgon · Post by **Hirgon** » Tue Apr 15, 2003 1:36 pm

Ah, I see you've gone ahead with that - clever trick

Heh, here's hoping that any savings in bandwidth aren't offset by lots of people who haven't read the instructions e-mailing you wondering why the zip files aren't working properly...

Post by **Gina** » Tue Apr 15, 2003 3:15 pm

Nothing yet...I do hope it is working for anyone downloading. I've tried it myself on different computers, connections, etc and it worked fine. Mostly I decided to go with this because I also host the site for the music group Vis Sit Tecum Musicorum (also a member myself), which played at the TORN Oscar Party. Anyway, we posted a report to TORN yesterday and I wanted to make sure bandwidth wasn't a problem right now. Anytime one is linked to TORN one is likely to get 20,000+ hits! I may in fact go back to regular mp3s at some point.

Hirgon · Post by **Hirgon** » Tue Apr 15, 2003 4:22 pm

Gina wrote:Nothing yet...I do hope it is working for anyone downloading. I've tried it myself on different computers, connections, etc and it worked fine. Mostly I decided to go with this because I also host the site for the music group Vis Sit Tecum Musicorum (also a member myself), which played at the TORN Oscar Party. Anyway, we posted a report to TORN yesterday and I wanted to make sure bandwidth wasn't a problem right now. Anytime one is linked to TORN one is likely to get 20,000+ hits! I may in fact go back to regular mp3s at some point.

Worked fine for me... I think this method only really causes trouble if people try to rename the files *after* they've downloaded them.

20,000+ hits from TORN? Wow.. remind me never to advertise my site there... it'd be gone in a day

*wanders off to read Oscar party report*