Ah yes, it's an old story told, of the ignorant greed of the entire online community. It is an evil disease that strikes the best of us, but no one is immune. Yes, my friends, it is the direct-linker. It has killed off many of our favorite websites, especially graphics pages. This deadly "plague" is quite simple to catch, and this is how it works;
A rather lazy or ignorant person decide they like some of the graphic content of another persons website, but they don't want to download it onto their server, so they change the image tag to the address of the image on the other person's site. This is the "infection" called direct-linking or bandwidth theft; the more direct linking is added, the "sicker" the original site gets. Some of the symptoms include:
Slower bandwidth, slower loading time,
The prices of the server go up, and could lead to the death of the site by two ways; a mercy killing by the server (i.e. Miss Haruna's Classroom), or the death of the site by the owner (i.e. Diana's Divine Designs). Unless treated, these will be the results.
The "antibiotics" are limited to a degree. You can start out with a simple warning, but if that doesn't help:
Use image maps and screen captures (i.e. Goddess Goodies) but this leds to a great deal of images on your site, and can eat up space, especially on web servers like geocities.
Change your image names so the direct-linker ends up with broken images, but this is a lenghty process, and you can end up with broken links yourself.
Finally, you can report the direct-linkers websites to the server. Direct-linking is against the terms of agreement of all servers, so the site will be removed, but you will have to do this with every site doing so, and keep up with it constantly.
You realize that even with these "antibiotics" you and all other sites won't be safe from this disease, but if you teach yourself not to do this, as well as warning other site owners of the results of direct-linking, you will help educate and stop this plague before it begins.