GaimeGuy said:
Just because "people have been doing the same thing all the time in this thread" doesn't make it any more or less right.
It's illegal, and I'm 99% sure that it's also a bannable offense.
Actually, you're wrong on several counts.
First, case law does not present a precedent There is no law that specifically makes hotlinking illegal so the only way it could hypothetically be illegal is if case law represented a clear precedent. It doesn't.
Deep linking was nominally protected in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation; although deep linking and hotlinking are not necessarily similar, it does show one important thing. Hotlinking or deep linking does not always or automatically constitute copyright infringement.
Perfect 10 v. Google actually ruled against the above finding and then was overturned on appeal. So that's three conflicting findings, right there. However, there's another aspect to Perfect 10 v. Google that is useful to look at; judges debated the merits of Framing, the court found that framing, or putting a distant website's deep linked page inside a frame within Google as a broader site was
legal, specifically reasoning that since Google only provided the instruction for the user's browser to fetch the files, they could not be held liable. Consider applying this test to hotlinking.
There has never been a ruling in regards to hotlinking that addresses the issue of whether or not "bandwidth leeching" is illegal. Is seems obvious that this is the issue you are referring to, since only a nutcase would be claiming that Gaffers leeching images are profiting, claiming ownership, or infringing copyright.
Second, hotlinking is not always illegal. Even if you accept that hotlinking can be illegal, it is not automatically so. Many companies can and do consent to hotlinking. The most obvious example is a banner ad or an image host. Evidently, then, there must be some way to determine whether or not it is illegal in the case of an individual server. From a due dilligence point of view, I would argue that .htaccess / referrer denial would be considered an acceptable metric. At the bare minimum something like a robots.txt denial or other instruction to prevent content access, or a META noindex tag on the page hosting the images, or
some sort of indication that the site does not want you to leech will be needed.
If I remember correctly, the anti-leeching rule on GAF is primarily to prevent the blowback if a leeched image gets swapped with Goatse or PAIN or a password-security image that causes every reading of the thread ot have to cancel out of a password dialog. None of these will ever happen.
There's a clear difference between image leeching product images from Amazon.com or screenshots from GameSpot or the Smash Brothers website and image leeching for some guy's little server where it's going to cost him or her money.