Tom Raftery decided to get tough with a blogger who hot linked an image from his site. Rather than send an email to the offender Tom decided to go public on his blog and change the image being hot linked to read that the person was a thief. I’m deliberately not mentioning the persons name here as once it gets Googled, forever more that persons name and the word thief will be linked.
There seems to be some controversy over Tom doing this. Some think that he’s quite within his rights and moreover absolutely entitled to do this. Others think he went a bit over the top.
I’m a bit undecided about this. I agree that Tom is entitled to do this. I even think it was a pretty efficient way of ensuring that a, the matter was resolved ASAP and b, that it is far less likely to happen in the future. Double whammy if you will.
Where I do think he went a bit over the top was in not amending his post title once the matter was rectified. Tom argues that “Noah may be sorry but he’s sorry that he was caught, not for doing wrong. If he was sorry for stealing the bandwidth, he’s take all the other hotlinked images off his site and stop stealing their bandwidth too.”.
Ok fair enough but who went and made Tom the Chief of Internet police. But at the same time the person in question has drawn this on themselves, is being naughty by hot linking elsewhere and has tried to claim that they had the right to hotlink under Tom’s share alike policy.
My gut feeling on this is that Tom made a good point initially. He had the moral high ground and got the issue resolved smartly. But continuing in the vein of “I know what you mean. I feel sorry for him too. I note he is still stealing bandwidth from many other sites - some people are obviously slow learners” is eroding that success and is beginning to make Tom look a bit puritanical. That would be a shame as Toms blog is always an interesting read. As the title of the post suggests, this person will now have their name associated as being a thief and in my opinion that is over the top.
Besides whom else can I get to fill the role of Dr Evil? 
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I should have taken a more humourous approach to this issue initially rather than the bad tempered one (it was Monday morning and I'm a red head!).
Basically, in future I'll try to remember to take a deep breath before clicking the Publish button.
As I said in the post I am undecided still about this, and far be it from me to cast stones at any one for shooting first and asking questions later.
John
To be honest, I'd have backed down sooner and more if he had removed all hotlinked images from his site.
The fact that he hasn't says to me that he is sorry he was outed so brutally by me and not that he is sorry for hotlinking in the first place (as he continues to do it!). Check out his site - there are 7 hotlinked images on the front page alone.