Not neccesarily. I was thinking of this story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26074139> At the height of the browser wars I once woke up to Microsoft hotlinking a small button for downloading our software from the MSN homepage. I tried to reach someone there for hours but nobody cared enough to do something about it. The image was small (no more than a few K), but the millions of requests that page got were enough to totally kill our server.
> Finally, I replaced the image on there with a 'Netscape Now' button. Within 15 minutes the matter was resolved.
And there was another case where some Indian app was using excessive traffic from Wikimedia, which was solved similarly. Sometimes you have to do something to get the attention of the right people. (And I could imagine if you do it right and are not too malicious, you might actually get a bug bounty on top.)