About This Site

Background

This site was put together by Steve Teare with the encouragement, approval and participation of the Klarwein family, notably Serafine Klarwein.

Copyright Information

All images and content of this site are Copyright © the Klarwein family, except where specifically credited to others. Reproduction or copying of the images or other content of this site for any purpose whatsoever is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. The sole exception to this is as detailed under the heading 'Legitimate Image Usage'.

If you wish to licence any of the images on this site for commercial use, or enquire about other work by Mati Klarwein which is not represented here, then please email the Klarwein family at matiklarwein@gmail.com.

Hotlinking

Hotlinking is the practice of displaying images on one web site that are actually hosted on someone else's site, without the consent of the originating site owner. Hotlinkers not only use the images without consent, they also use bandwidth from the originating site in order to display them. If, for example, you have a myspace page that links to this site to display a Mati Klarwein painting on your page, then you are hotlinking. Each time your myspace page loads, it is hitting my server with a request for that image. Now, I take a fairly liberal view on this: Although such usage may not be ethically correct, it is all helping to raise awareness and appreciation for the work of Mati Klarwein, which was my purpose in building this site in the first place, so in principal I don't have too much objection.

The problem is that now such usage has grown to the extent that it accounts for more than 50% of the bandwidth consumed by this site. I want to make sure that this site is responsive and provides a good experience for visitors so I am taking steps to prevent hotlinking of images. What this means is that if in the past you have been hotlinking images from this site, you will likely see those images replaced with this:

Not too pretty I know, but if you read on I will try to explain how you can prevent this.

Legitimate Image Usage

As stated earlier, the copyright of the images on this site belongs to the Klarwein family. Technically any copying of those images for use on another web site is an infringement of that copyright. In practice however, the reality is that, if you put an image on the web, it is going to get copied all over the net, and if you really don't want it copied, then you probably shouldn't put it up there in the first place.

So the problem is to distinguish what can be deemed acceptable or legitimate usage from what is clearly not acceptable. My take on this is as follows. If you want to use an image from this site on a web page or site of yours, then you need to comply with three conditions:

1. You need to host the image, not link to it hosted here. In practice this means that you need to take a copy of the image and either host it yourself or use one of the many free or paid image hosting services to host it.
2. The image you display must not be larger than 450 pixels in width or 600 pixels in height. It must be to scale and unaltered except for any scaling needed to get it within these size limits.
3. You must include a clickable link back to this site or to the page on this site containing the original image on any page of yours that uses images from here. Note that you should not link directly to the image itself as this will not work because of the hotlink protection.

An Unfortunate Side-Effect

An unfortunate side-effect of implementing the above change is that you may sometimes get the above 'Image Hotlink Refused' image error message when browsing this site - after you have visited a site that contains hotlinks back to this one. The reason for this is that when you visit the other site, your browser will cache the above image error message as being the image itself, so when you then visit this site and attempt to view that same image, your browser will load the above image from its cache.

The solution to this for single images is to click 'reload' on your browser. The image will then display correctly. If you are having this problem with multiple images, clearing you browser cache will cause your browser to load fresh copies for all the images.