What is hotlinking? It's when a person shows an image on their site that is actually being sent from another site. Hotlinking is harmful because it means the person actually hosting the image is having to pay for the internet usage whenever someone views the hotlinker's site.

I have decided to document the use of my images from my site by hotlinking and give fair warning to those thinking of doing so in the future. When I find an image hotlinked I will change it to something that seems humorous to me. Examples will follow as I find them.

A new one from December 3, 2005.
The owner of the site
http://www.xanga.com/Good_Charlotte_1743
claims to have taken these pictures during her 2004 storm chase tour.

Thing is, they were pictures I took during my 2005 chases. How do I know this? Because they are being hotlinked off MY site!
Reading her captions, I found something too hard not to change...

You guessed it! Her site got the privilege of the uncensored images...

Here's the November 1, 2005 post from http://www.xanga.com/beccak83

Bad thing about it is that she infers that she took the pictures. I changed the one that was mine...

Here's someone causing my usage of a Colorado picture to spike:
http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=rprice

I changed my image to a friendly reminder on the inappropriateness of hotlinking:

It reads, "... which is sad cause I know he’ll be bangin’ other girls. Oh well, it gives me time to Google the word ‘hotlinking’. Did you know it is inappropriate to use someone else’s image without asking? Even worse is when you just link to an image on their server cause it means that every time someone visits my page THEY have to pay."

Let's look at Kayla's page: http://myspace.com/kutiekay
That's a lovely picture of the Golden Gate Bridge you have there!

Sorry that I had to change it.
The caption reads:

Plan for today:
Look up word 'HOTLINKING'