i don’t think copyright violation or circumvention applies in this case because the ToS states that the uploader retains all rights (though perhaps some law is somehow triggered in some territory). however, point taken about respecting standard browsing behavior and being a “good web citizen” – when you put it that way, i think it makes no sense to ship referer spoofing as an official feature.
yes, i should be able to manage to get the images pulled in (without watermark) for my migration. in my case with the phpbb importer, i think it’s easiest to just temporarily modify discourse itself to spoof referer when downloading remote images and do a rebake since the importer doesn’t handle saving remote images (aside from avatars).
i was mostly just wanting to hear from people who have tackled this problem before. i was also curious if it was technically possible to have a plugin do it (still wondering) and if it would even make sense to have discourse officially ship such a feature (it doesn’t).