I have been following this a bit and it seems to have ethical breakpoints and several logistical issues at minimum.
The most basic being the ethics of blatant theft. Both bandwidth and content theft combined in an example of kleptomania seeking proper reward. OUR ethics then become not so much if we arrange proper credit to thieves but how gracious we are or are not in doing so. That refers to the "poison images" option mentioned earlier. Angelfire had a trick where hot linking to their pages "overlaid" an almost moire pattern of their logo rendering the images quite useless to the thieves. I cannot comment on the how- but the result made it quite clear that the cretin claiming an Angelfire user's stuff as being owned differently was an incompetent thief. WE also are not talking Bill Gate's J-Dollars costing of "stolen software" This is more about the claims of ownership and reputation at stake. The real dollar costs of Bandwidth etc are almost bordering on civil criminality if it's profiting an infringing bad actor.
Thus, if no one disputes the difference between "fair use" and frank outright theft we are seeing this get a bit more on solid moral ground. Those claiming that "cost" is not a factor would change their tune if it were their bill for per hit costs going way up. Or their images being used in ways they would rather not. That is in many cases *WAY* afield of the aforementioned fair use. To border on oxymoronic to dispute what is or not fair. IF it's questionable maybe we should default to asking the content owner before WE link stuff for a customer!
In that last thought lies my ethics pitch. While there are those who have the skills to steal both content and bandwidth, relabeling both as if another were the rightful owner- I suspect the majority of such theft is done |"for hire" As in "White or Black hat web developers hitting the dark side. Both by active filching and passive failure to lock down items NOT intended to be "shared" Creative Commons or Conventional Copyright assignments sort of both break if our ethics do not support a rule of law.
SO we have the ethics of theft being not only wrong in itself- but arguably making us -the technical class, passive accomplices. For failing to make it duly rewarded as the crime it is.
And furthermore- it's an opening for the Open Source world to PROVE that we are better at real security than the closed models ever can be.