I remember in the early days of web design, hotlinking was a huge issue. One person hotlinked to my website so much that I forwarded his links to porno lol. Anyway these days I don't care too much; I am more into the freedom of information kind of things. I don't think it is illegal to hotlink, I have never heard of any lawsuit about hotlinking. And many pirate sites get away with it because they hotlink to other sites which host illegal content, so they dont become hosts themselves. But in webhonesty 2.3, it is probably the right thing to do to ask the original content provider if its ok to hotlink.
