[cd34]

From the hotlinking I've seen in the access logs, those rules should have worked.

The IP address blocks are not really that useful. I usually tend to use referrer blocking, allowing the empty referrer because some personal privacy software sends a blank or invalid referrer and leave it at that. If you start blocking IPs, you're going to get a very long list very quickly and are going to have to continue adding IPs as you find them.

I can see that those rules are currently working. My assumption is that for some reason, AllowOverride was disabled for your webspace and your rules weren't being used, or, an .htaccess file further down in your directory structure turned RewriteEngine off or specified a different rule. Without RewriteOptions Inherit, any RewriteRules placed in a lower directory take precedence.