Holy Fuck!
No one said that skimming is illegal, but back in the day when it all started, there were no "thumb TGP's" & it was just a skim off a text link. Personally, I'm not one to fuck over my surfers with blind links in the hopes that others will fuck over their surfers with other blind links & maybe one of them will buy something when they get fucked & sent to my site. I prefer good old fashioned hard work & marketing skills to get sales.
Now you have webmasters posting a copyrighted image but not sending all the traffic to that site & IMHO that is illegal.
In this case, you also had all kinds of alarms going off because of the malicious pop-up's that came when you clicked as well.
Put yourself in Torn's shoes - you shot this content - it's for your personal website - you see one of the images on someone else's site & click on it, thinking that you'll be going to a gallery on your server. You then get sent to a top list or some other site & have your spyware alarm's going off left & right. You'd be pissed too!
If other sponsor's & content providers want to allow this, that's great - good for them! But we are not talking about anyone other than Torn & Kat! Their website, their content - THEIR RULES!