I don’t remember what site I posted that on… all I remember is that I very narrowly avoided being banned.

Then there was that guy on Ebay attempting to fraud people by claiming he had a machine for sale… then hotlinking to the pictures from the real, legitimate auction.

When the real auction owner found this, he replaced the pictures of the PC with pictures of an old, burnt-out PC (literally, on fire).

For example, if you had a picture of a rose on your site and I wanted to display it on mine, I should save the image, upload it to my server and use the IMG tag to point to the file. Asking permission and/or providing a return link, as I do with my article graphics, are also good ideas.

Hotlinkers skip this process and instead point the IMG tag directly to the image they want. In this example, I would include an IMG tag pointing to the rose picture on your site, not my own.

In addition to using your data transfer, hotlinking forces the source server to work extra in order to field all the additional requests.

In response to your question of a better way to link to an article, there really are only a few options and none of them are stellar. You could save or reproduce the original work in order to reference it again in the future. Also, major search engines offer a “cache” feature which allows you to see how a page existed in the past. Similarly, the Internet Archive provides a historical look at page content.