Hotlinking according to altlab is:

Not a day goes by without me checking to see if someone is hotlinking to files owned by Short Consulting clients or myself. I’d like to share some of the cases of hotlinking I’ve had to deal with in the past year.

Adventures in Hotlinking will be an ongoing series of articles about my experiences in dealing with bandwidth theft.

Hot Stealing

There’s hotlinking then there is just flat out theft of an entire web page. On Our Life I wrote a Global War on Terrorism news story which was duplicated in its entirity by an Italian web site.

I contacted the web hosting provider of the infringing web site and was told to fill out a copyright violation form. I did and sent it in; as you can tell, it didn’t do any good. If I were a real asshole I’d get a lawyer and sue the guy and his host for millions. Instead I just blocked all referrals from that site via a .htaccess file which effectively prevents all hotlinking and potential bandwidth theft.

It also prevents people to traverse from that page to any page at the Short Family Web Site which is fine by me.