aeiouy - 5:08 pm on Jun 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Of course hotlinking is theft; theft of bandwidth, and usually of copyright too.

Quadrille, not sure I can agree with that. If I go to a site and later type in a url directly to an image am I stealing badnwidth? Of course not. The server is openly serving the image file to anyone who wants it or types in the URL. It is nice to be accusatory and claim it is theft of bandwidth, but that is really not an accurate offense. Of all the potential legal angles, theft of bandwidth for hotlinking or framing has to be by far the most marginal one.

Heck someone can say he came across the URL to the image somewhere else on the net and just used it from there. How would the person know what else the image went with? It was readily available and directly accessible as a stand-alone item. Linking is not illegal.