It means you’re using someone else’s bandwidth to post one of their images in place they don’t intend for the image to go. Usually, that means outside of a specific website.
When people link to, say, a 4 meg gif file on my personal server account and send it to their thousands of MySpace friends as a profile comment, where it is seen by, say, a hundred thousand people, it can be a serious drain. That 4 meg file has now consumed 400,000 megabytes of bandwidth that I’m paying for. If I only have 10 gigs a month of bandwidth which I’m already using most of, that can quickly cause me to go over my limit. I’ll have to pay a fee because someone else can’t be bothered to host the image themselves.
This is one reason Goatse is famous. By replacing the animated gif of a cute kitten falling asleep with a gif of a man holding his rectum open (using the same file name), irritated webmasters have been able to strike back at image leechers. So it’s a bad idea to do it.
Photobucket and other online places exist to get around this, so people can host their images without screwing up anyone else’s bandwidth. All you have to do is copy the source image and reupload it.
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