Hotlinking

Hotlinking (also called inline linking, direct linking or leeching) follows from the design of the web itself: HTTP does not distinguish between kinds of links, so a page can point to an image on any server. The practice became a common complaint on forums, free hosts and personal sites because the site that owns the file pays the bandwidth for every view while the embedding page gets the benefit. Site owners answered by checking the HTTP referer header and replacing the image, for example with a warning picture, or by blocking the request with URL rewriting; guides to such rules were being published by 2004. In the United States, Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com (9th Cir., 2007) held that embedding an image by linking, without storing a copy, was not a direct display of that image. The date when the term first appeared is not documented.