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@gbj_tester
No. I think I made that clear in my post.
If you falsify headers in order to access a file, does that constitute unauthorised use of a computer network? Dunno, ask a lawyer. I haven't studied the relevant laws in enough detail to have a worthwhile opinion on that question, but falsifying headers doesn't seem very different from using a password not issued to you by the owner of the service.
Type this into your browser:
http://jorj.co.uk/gallery/gal/bars/PICT0800.jpg
or just click on the link. That file exists, and is publicly available, but it's 3.7MB. I don't care what people do with it, but if it gets hotlinked on a popular forum, you can see why I'd rather serve a 233 byte png every time the forum page gets viewed. Whether my bandwidth is constrained by a transfer limit or a speed limit, I'd rather reserve the capacity for people visiting my site.
Using the referrer header to decide which of 2 possible files to serve may not be "best practice" for your needs, but it is cheap and effective for mine. I don't need to take your word for this, I've seen my server logs and watched this simple and largely unobtrusive technique drop the number of times a particular set of images was served by a factor of 100, bringing them into line with similar sets which hadn't been fusked.