Though many people online are not polite, which brings us back to needing a law to protect people, their files, and ideas.

I’ve always believed that if you’re going to link to something that’s non-HTML, you should link to the page on the destination site that links to it, not the direct file itself – if only because the file itself could change without your knowledge, but the site responsible for maintaining that file is likely going to update their own page to keep it accurate.

Is it illegal to link directly to it? I don’t think it should be, unless you can prove some kind of outrageous damages (like a few TB of extra bandwidth because some asshat hotlinked to something through their MySpace profile). The idea behind the internet is that it’s supposed to be a big shared resource. That’s why links exist in the first place – to point people to material elsewhere that may be of interest or help.

Illegal? I don’t think so. Impolite? Perhaps. Stupid from a future accuracy perspective? In most cases.