Originally Posted by
darksiderising
Here's how it works: You have a cap on bandwidth usage provided to you by your hosting service. If you go over that, you have to pay for a higher bandwidth package. Every time someone loads this page, they use some bandwidth. If a lot of people are viewing this page (and any other page hotlinking to that photo), their site or that picture could go down temporarily.
By your logic, if an author doesn't want their material plagiarized, they shouldn't publish it.
Your analogy is exactly wrong. If I downloaded and copied a photo, hosted it myself, and pretended that I had taken it myself,
that would be analogous to plagiarism.
Using an IMG tag is simply another way of sharing a publicly accessible URL. It's no more malicious than simply posting the URL itself. Either method could potentially cause bandwidth problems.