a preponderance of evidence : Preventing Image Theft

Over on a preponderance of evidence the author has a nice post about image theft. That is making an image reference on a page to an image that is actually hosted on another page. At first glance one might not think that it's a huge problem until you think about the amount of bandwidth it takes to load that image several times. If the original author has limited bandwidth or has to pay for his web space on a metered scale you can really cause him some trouble by hijacking an image in this way. As the owner of a sizable online image collection, I've dealt with this problem several times. Usually by ignoring it. However, this is another side to this story. If an author puts an all-rights reserved copyright on his www page, I don't feel right just copying his image to my server. I've also had authors ask me to remove their content from my server and just link to it on their server. I've also interacted with authors who feel the same way as the author on a preponderance of evidence. So what is a guy to do? Here is what I generally do. If I find a pic on a site that I would like to include on my site I try the following things:

1. Look for a copyright notice that tells you it's ok to copy the image. Like a Create Commons symbol. If the author has already said it's ok to copy the image then move it to your server and make the link that way, and attribute it correctly by the terms in the copyright statement.
2. If there is no copyright statement or it's all rights reserved, I will link to the image on the author's server, and then send him an email asking for permission to copy the image over to my server. My link also contains an href to the original item or page and a very clear attribution.

So, that's my suggestion. Just treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Keep an eye on your referrer logs, and everyone will be ok. I don't think there is really much need for taking a bunch of technological measures which just make it harder to use the internet as a place to freely exchange ideas.