Photobucket accused of blackmail

[Geek-9pm]

Photo bucket is a popular photo sharing site. Is is a free service. Or is it?
Look at this:
Photobucket accused of blackmail after quietly requiring users to pay $400 a year to hotlink

It all began last week when Photobucket announced in a short blog post that it had updated its terms of service that had begun taking effect from June 20th. Nowhere in the blog post did Photobucket highlight the most important change, which was that it will now cost uploaders $400 a year to insert their photos on another website using direct image links.

What?  Is this tr true?   

[BC_Programmer]

Well, for starters, these people need to pick up a dictionary. Blackmail is when you demand money from somebody in return for not revealing compromising information. For example if you demand payment from somebody to not reveal that you found out they were having an affair, or something.

The closest argument could be made for extortion. But even that is a stretch. The argument would be that people like ebayers and craigslist advertisers and so forth that have been using photobucket hotlinking would have to move the images to another host and update their links.

I don't think that is extortion. That's just the end-users being lazy. And at the level where there are so many instances to update that it's a lot of work, why were they using a free image upload service and relying on it for what is effectively a business to begin with?

[patio]

+1...it ain't blackmail.
Just another sensationalised Geek story...

[SuperDave]

I had this warning about one month ago but it hasn't affected my use of Photobucket on third party sites such as the forum but I have noticed that other people have been affected.

[camerongray]

I see why it's annoying but to be honest I don't blame them - Photobucket relies on advertising on their website to generate revenue from free users.  If people hotlink images on other sites, Photobucket won't get any of this advertising revenue while still having to deal with the costs of the additional server load caused by requests to the hot-linked images.  Personally I always avoid hot-linking images on websites and instead will either upload it directly to the website that the image is being used on or link to it.