What is Hotlinking?

Some time we like any image or media file and wish to add on our website we have 2 ways to do so.

• Download it to your hard drive and upload it to your own server (after checking that is allowed to be used)... or,
• Add it to your page without uploading it to your website in other words embedding it directly into your website.
<img scr="http://www.othersite.com/not-my-image.jpg">

If you chose #1, then fine is not the case of hotlink! If you chose number 2, then please aware this is theft.

"Hotlinking" (also called “hot linking”, ”inline linking”, “remote linking”, “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft.

Why is Hotlinking wrong?
If the person who owns the media file you are embedding into your own website gives permission to hotlink, then nothing is wrong. Sadly, this is not usually the case.

If you don't have permission, remote linking to any media and / or program file is theft. Yes, theft.. Even if it's a clipart archive offering free images, a music server giving away free tunes or a website with freeware... Unless the original website specifically states otherwise, hotlinking is stealing.

If you say, "I didn't steal anything; the file is right where the owner left it!", let me explain this a bit. Each time a file is called from our servers we have what is called a data transfer request, or another way of saying it.. We have bandwidth used.

Bandwidth is a bit like gas for a car. Every time you drive (or a file is loaded), a bit of fuel (or bandwidth) is used up. Now imagine if each night one of your neighbors siphoned out a tiny bit for their own car... then other neighbors thought "I'll just take a couple drops as well"... by morning your fuel tank is empty. Your neighbors each thought taking just a tiny bit would be unnoticeable.. but added all up it left nothing for you.
Serving up images is not only usually our biggest consumer of bandwidth, when others remotely link to them (ie. embed them in their websites from our servers without our permission), we have to pay... bandwidth is not free! Most websites have a limited amount of data transfer and the website owners either have to cough up extra money each month to pay the fees, or face shutting down.

from Angela:

Hotlinking is the practice of displaying a file, example an image or flash object on a page that is stored on another sites. It is when someone uses a link to an image that is saved on another website instead of saving a copy of the image on the website that the picture will be shown on.

Hot-linking uses the bandwidth of the person who owns the website where the file is stored because the file is being called from the server of origin, that account is the one that wears the bandwidth expense for delivering the image for display.

The authorized example can be provided of YouTube, where on each video linking code is also provided for the easy implementation and display of the video on user profiles and web sites external to the service.

Hotlinking works like this:
instead of the following method of coding for displaying an image:
<img src="image.gif"> --- which references an image on the local server, hotlink code is used like this:
<img src="http://differentsite.com/gif.jpg"> --- the image is being displayed on the page, but another site is delivering the content.

from Satish:
Hotlinking" (also called "hot linking", "leeching", and "bandwidth theft") is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft. The term is also used loosely (a misnomer) by free image hosts which allow you to store images on their server and allow you to direct link the hosted image files on forums or other websites (sometimes altering the image to have a watermark). One of the most common occurrences of "hot linking" is when people are forum posting and they hotlink pictures from another website to use as avatars or signature images on the messageboards (forums). Some disadvantages of hot linking worth considering are that the webpage generally loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web hosting server than the webpage is hosted on, and the owner of the image has full control to disable hotlinking, or delete, rename, or worse yet, do a "switcheroo" (i.e., switching the file name to be another image which is sure to cause the hotlinker embarrassment) of the hot-linked image. Common methods of preventing hotlinking are by using an .htaccess file, using the "Hotlink Protection" offered in control panels such as Cpanel, or simply renaming image files periodically.