Deeplinking Considered Harmful

Standardizing audio/video on the web #N: deeplinking considered n/a

Lucas raises a good point. I believe if an object is linkable, it is ethical to link to it. My host pair throws out the highest bandwidth day in any month and computes an average which is what you are billed on. So if my site is slashdotted, it won't kill me.
That being said, if your host is not so gracious, look into managing your site better. You can wrap your images so they can only be displayed from a page on your site... but what about big files...

Well in general support for bittorent of files seems like an ok fix, it would put the burden on the downloaders. I would like to see better integration with Firefox and or, and oh how I hate saying this Internet Explorer.

But the real answer is to use a freecache link instead! Freecache is a very nice option. It is as easy as appending the URI on the end of http://freecache.org/ .
So http://freecache.org/http://kennethhunt.com/crabvspipe1.mpg is a valid free cache link. Here is the hyperlink: crab pipe video which will pull this file from the cache.
No administration is required, accessing the content through a link caches the content. Yet at the same time, the request shows up in the webserver logs of the original hosting site so you can determine popularity.

Really simple!