Just a thought….

Frank

Member shall not interfere with another Member’s use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.

I’d say this member was interfering with YOUR use and enjoyment of a similar service.

I don’t think a real person answered your email. Here is the text from that page:

Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where a contact email address is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with the author to have this situation remedied.
Additionally, there are measures you can (and should) take to protect your images from being linked to, described in the following articles:
* Apache-Sever.com, “Preventing Image ‘Theft’”
* BestFX.com Tutorial, “Preventing Hot Linking of Images”
* Webmaster World discussion thread, “Using htaccess to prevent image linking”
Please follow up with your web host if you have any questions about implementing these techniques.

Look familiar? Are there any REAL people working at Google, or is it all Googlebot?

if you use the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?tamba2.org.uk [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|gif|jpe?g)$ tubgirl.$1 [NC,L]


in your .htaccess that should see you right.

A quick explanation of this code –
The first line here turns on mod_rewrite (a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly) and only needs to be done once per .htaccess file.

The next line is needed to allow your site to be viewed through proxy caches. If you take it out, then anyone without a referer won’t be able to view your site. Many proxy caches, for instance, block referers… and that looks the same as a directly-entered URL.

The third line tells the .htaccess file where to allow image files to be served from – in this case it will allow images be served from http://tamba2.org.uk and http://www.tamba2.org.uk

It is a very good idea not to redirect a browser from one file type to another. The cleanest approach is to make a seperate version of your the tubgirl.jpg file in each format that you use on your site. Then redirect each hot-linked image to the matching filetype.

In the RewriteRule above (the final line), the “$1″ in the last line refers back to the contents of the parenthesis in the same line. That is, a request for a .jpg file will be redirected to http://www.tamba2.org.uk/tubgirl.jpg, and a request for a .gif file will be redirected to http://www.tamba2.org.uk/tubgirl.gif, etc.

The L in the square brackets is the “last ruleâ€? – it stops the rewriting process here and tells the .htaccess file not to apply any more rewriting rules while the NC ensures that the rules are case insensitive.

For more see http://www.tomrafteryit.net/category/htaccess/

When it comes down to it though, he has stolen what is mine, and Google do not care.

Surely, if this guy is stealing (which he demonstrably is) and is using Google’s resources to do so, then, you’d think that having been informed of this abuse of their facilities to break the law, they’d have to attempt to stop it, or face being accused of complicity.

Tom