K. If someone makes something and people like it, they deserve credit and/or the traffic and/or possibility of people liking other work they've done. This is especially true of comic artists who would not continue to create them without homepage visits. There have been over 100 views of this thread which is quite significant when you consider the potential chances of someone then resharing a link with their friends and then other people further sharing down the line.

When authors don't get return on what they produce then those things no longer get produced. In short - If you like something it makes absolutely no fucking sense to share something in a manner that means the author gets nothing from it. When you choose to share something you have the option of potentially generating 100s for an author by sharing legitimately (because of the share chain that occurs) or generating nothing by not sending people to author sites. Many people do this out of ignorance, knowingly doing it however is just being a dick for no purpose whatsoever.

At least with torrenting the product is always well attributed to the owners and the generated forum discussion is a mass advert to those people that would pay for things. Plagiarism(which hotlinking officially is) gives absolutely nothing back to authors at all.