Let me ask you this - if your neighbor tapped into your water or electricity and over time your costs began climbing, and you finally realized just what they were doing and how much it was costing you, wouldn't you be upset?
That is what was going on, only this isn't water or electricity but bandwidth, and it still costs them money. Their get their revenue from ads, and if people are bypassing the ads, their expenses for that bandwidth don't get paid.
Folks, if somebody outside of FR was directly linking to pics on FR, and it caused JR's bills to rise, and he had no way to get the expenses back from the people directly linking and had to pay for it out of his pocket, a lot of you would be screaming for somebody's head.