What do you do when someone steals your content? I'm talking a direct cut and paste here, word for word. Personally it pisses me off. Some lazy ass hat, not willing to put in the time to write something themselves, rips off your stuff, posts it, and then pinches some bandwidth while they are at it to display some images.

Well, this happened to me today. Someone ripped off a post I did on the new Audi A4, word for word, and included the pictures I'd posted as well. I've never considered it a good idea to post images on my blog that are hosted elsewhere. Besides the issue of bandwidth theft, which is just not on in my opinion, there is also the issue of control. If I were to link direct to a file on another site, I'd have no real control of the file. The original owner could change it or replace it with something completely different.

This evening, I decided it high time to test my theory. So I decided to replace the original Audi A4 images the thief had embedded with something else.

Here's a screen dump of the thief's blog from five minutes ago (please note that no Audi A4 images are present).

Bandwidth thief

I'm sure there is a way to stop bandwidth theft by modifying the .htaccess file. I just need to do some research. So how do you deal with content and bandwidth theft?