CHEESY: Why is THE BLAZE hotlinking images from ZERO HEDGE?

I just happened upon a very neat infographic at The Blaze (via BadBlue) that depicts the amount of gold that exists in the world.

I wanted to grab a copy of the image for myself and just happened to look at the source of The Blaze image to see where they were hosting it. I was shocked to find that a monstrous, well-funded news site like The Blaze was hotlinking the image from Zero Hedge!

In this case, "Hotlinking" basically means that The Blaze is using the bandwidth, storage and servers of Zero Hedge to host its content. This practice could be excused if, for instance, it was simply a n00b blogger who didn't know what the heck he was doing.

In the case of The Blaze, however, it seems to be just another in a series of somewhat cheesy practices.

I've heard from fellow bloggers -- big bloggers, in fact -- that their content has been, uhm, appropriated by The Blaze without attribution on several occasions.

In fact, I've seen a bit of this kind of behavior myself, where an entire post was copied with as minor an attribution as can be imagined.

Look, I like and frequently link to The Blaze.

But I suspect Mr. Beck has enough extra pocket change to avoid hotlinking images and otherwise engaging in practices that are considered, at best, poor form. Here's a plea to the folks at The Blaze for more responsible attribution and hosting practices.