It's fairly surprising to see that approach from pretty large brands/companies. Some Indian ISPs are kinda notorious in that they'll just link to huge image files on third-party sites and just let their 300 million customers hammer the poor site into the ground. I guess it saves them bandwidth, but they also run a huge risk of pissing someone off and have that asset replaced by something nasty. When people use this kind of hard-linking/hot-linking of resource I don't think they do it to save money or to be evil, I think it mostly gross incompetence.
We had an issue where our product images would just be ruthlessly scraped, if there had been some rate-limiting in place we'd most likely just have allowed it or not noticed. Normally I just pointed the poor scraper to a multi-gigabyte file or funny and unrelated image, if you want to download the same image of a beaver 25.000 times go ahead.
But I also seen amateurishly search engines just pound a site to the point where it was easier to just deny all traffic coming from their crawler, as compared to try to reach out and figure something out. Say what you will about Google and Bing, their crawlers are well written and well behaved.