It’s a fairly common thing to protect your photos from being hotlinked — shown on another site but still hosted on yours. Bandwidth costs money, and people don’t like to have their hosting abused like that.
A common solution is to configure the server to show the correct image when people are on your site, but show a different image if it’s being shown elsewhere. The “other” image is typically a message along the lines of “this image was stolen from mysite.com”.
The NHL Officials apparently are trying to be proactive and prevent that from happening with the photos they’ve posted of the league officials. Unfortunately, they’ve neglected to include their own site on the “safe” list if people forget to use the www prefix.
Try it for yourself:
Featured Officials — http://www.nhlofficials.com/featured_officials.asp
Featured Officials with “copyrighted image” — http://nhlofficials.com/featured_officials.asp
This leads to two quick points:
1 –Make sure to use proper canonicalization. It’s a big word, but easy to implement. Not only will it help avoid situations like this, it’ll be a small boost to your SEO. The NHL Officials should be doing this already, but they’re obviously not.
2 — Be careful how you protect your photos. For tips on how to do it, just search Google for “hotlink protection” and you’ll find plenty of tutorials.
Too funny! A variation on this theme is sites that “protect” themselves by disabling right-click functions using JavaScript, which usually disables *all* right click functionality, not just saving pictures (which anyone with a modicum of HTML knowledge can circumvent by viewing the page source and uncovering the image URL that way).
In general copyright “protection” ends up hurting a site more than helping – for SEO, for user experience, and for chilling any warm fuzzy brand/site associations.
Exactly. I hate when sites disable right-click for the very reasons you gave. It doesn’t stop people from stealing your images, but simply irritates your users.
Kind of like heavy DRM on video games — doesn’t stop the pirates, but it gets in the way of your customers.