damn kochie you're loving hostile about this
which kind of reminded me of something, remember the HL2 beta leaks?
after a while, valve was fine with people ripping everything (which, at this time, 80% of that content is used in the half life 2 series) as long as they didn't touch the source code)
the majority of textures from hl2 beta are used actively in hl2 retail
this pretty much show valve doesn't give a stuff about the textures as long as you don't touch the game itself
a lot of games valve has made reuses textures a bunch too, it's not piracy or stealing unless you're doing stuff
dude, it's just skins and images. you're not enjoying a free game, you're pretty much just patching your game to get rid of the texture errors
you aren't gonna get banned for linking downloads for textures. piracy doesn't work like that