Re: Upload Images
It's definitely a moral no, and an etiquette no. Some people also say it's illegal though I've never heard of a prosecution for it, though technically, you can be sued for the money you cost the host (though I cannot imagine it'd be worth it financially, only really to be a crank).
It comes down to: someone has to pay for the bandwidth that's used and the server the image is stored on.
If an image is hosted on my own personal domain and you're hot-linking to, then you're actually costing me money here in the real world. When you make an account at a site of your own to host an image you want to serve instead, you are paying for it somehow -- by paying money for the server and its connection, or by entering an email account and details to a company who then sells it to marketeers, or who shows you ads, or whatever, to compensate them for the costs.
So anyway, morally icky, pretty rude, and technically illegal. And it is prone to get you into trouble when a host has enough of your leeching and serves super-skanky porn instead of the image you thought you were showcasing (really, it's a simple modification to a single file to do that). As a site mod, I very highly recommend that you don't engage in bandwidth theft.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:04, Wed 16 July 2014.