Quite frequently I come across scanned books that are viewable for free online. For example, the publisher put them there (such as preview chapters), a library (old books from their collection that are in public domain), etc. Since I like hoarding data, and the online viewers that are used to present the book to me might not be very practical, I frequently try to download the books one way or another. This requires toying with the “inspect element” tool and various other methods of getting the images/PDF. Now, all that I access is what is, well, accessible; I don’t hack into the servers or something. But - the stuff is meant to be hidden from the normal user. Does that act of hiding the material, no matter how primitive and easily circumvented, mean that I’m not allowed to access it at all?
I suppose ripping a public domain book is no big deal, but would books under copyright fare differently?
Mainly I’m asking out of curiosity, I don’t expect the police to come visit me for ripping a 16th century dictionary.
Note: I live in EU, but I’d be curious to hear how this is treated elsewhere too.
Edit: I also remembered a funny trick I noticed on one site - it allows viewing PDFs on their website, but not downloading, unless you pay for the PDF. But when you load the page, even without paying, the PDF is already downloaded onto your computer and can be found in the browser cache. Is it legal to simply save the file that is already on your computer?
According to the big tech its ok if you’re training large language model with it.
You’re confusing the law that applies for the ruling class with the one that applies to common people
If you can see it, you’ve already downloaded it. You’re just chosing to retain it.
As with everything with the law, it depends.
In Australia, distribution is the illegal part, seeding/sharing is where they get you. Not the actual download itself.
It’s usually not a question of legality, but efficiency.
It’s easy and efficient to bust someone for seeding, but busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.
busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.
And might well not be legally possible if all you have is an IP address, because lest we forget:
An IP is not an ID
Removed by mod
Nooo never…
You might not.
viewable for free online
If you are viewing it on your computer, you have already downloaded it.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.already downloaded onto your computer and can be found in the browser cache
Exactly.
Ask the AI companies who scraped my sites while the media companies were DCMA-ing everything in sight and working with enforcement paid for with publuc funds to prosecute/persecute the “pirates”.
I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.
People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.
Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.
Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.
What about AI? Don’t they basically do exactly this.
Sure, and I’d say that’s piracy too. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.
Not an expert, but in the U.S. making a copy of a broadcast for personal use is legal under fair-use. Anything that loads up on your computer screen you can make a copy and save it for personal use. So screen captures are by definition legal.
How exactly you copy the material on your screen gets tricky under the DMCA clusterfuck. Breaking encryption to copy the material is illegal unless there is an valid exception for fair-use. What exactly those valid exceptions are is above my paygrade.
Laws of course differ from country to country but generally if it is legally publicly available then no, it at best violates their EULA or something if you scrap such data. A company trying to prevent direct downloads cannot really charge you for you finding ways around that, because from a technical point of view the data was already cached onto your PC anyway.
As a tip, use the browsers F12 console’s Network tab, instead of inspect element. For videos you may also try the absolute right click addon. It breaks the video player controls when enabled but often you can just right click save video if it isn’t timed out and you can also enable regular controls via right click show controls. Tools like JDownloader2 can also often scrap various files but the former methods may work better.
There’s also the video download helper add-on for Firefox that will allow you to download streams that aren’t just media files your browser can http get. Though your browser can still access those streams, it needs a script component to handle it, so the built in file downloader/saver won’t even see it as a thing to download.
That one is scummy as hell.
How so?
Just check the reviews, or the permissions.
Reviews say it’s adding a giant QR code to downloaded videos to get people to pay a license fee but I do not see that after downloading something just now. Though tbf, they did update it yesterday and might have removed that because of the feedback they were getting.
Permissions look reasonable to me, based on my understanding of what they need to do for the functionality, though I suppose there is potential for abuse.
It requires a companion desktop program for some streams, which did seem sketchy at first but I wasn’t able to find any specific claims of it doing anything undesired, just people who noped out when they saw it wanted them to install something and others who said it does function as desired. Again, hard to say if it does anything in addition to enabling some streams to be downloaded, but I haven’t noticed anything out of place on my PC since installing it either from tool-based scans or manual checks of places where malware can put itself to survive restarts.
There were also claims that it didn’t work with YouTube in the reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me, since it does light up. Though maybe that was timing-based, too, where Google briefly managed to block it only for them to adjust.
So I haven’t seen any of those issues but YMMV. I’m going to keep using it but will also keep an eye on it. Either way, thanks for letting me know.
Everything on the Internet can be downloaded, copied etc
You care more than all of the ‘AI’ companies combined
Depends on where you are. Usually if it’s a legal source, you can save it. But you’re not supposed to share it unless given permission. If you downloaded it from a source that’s not legal, things might change, depending on the specifics of your law.
Mind posting a guide on how you tinker with those inspect element tools?
Right click -> inspect element (Q) works.
You can also press F12.
And if right click is blocked, on Firefox holding SHIFT will unblock right click. There is also a plugin that does this for you.
Often websites will put an invisible element in front of the content to intercept this trick, but you can navigate through the elements to find the one they were trying to obfuscate.
Also you can just block elements you right click on in Firefox (though this might be an option added by an add-on). If there’s hidden elements you just need to go through each of those until you can click on the one you want directly (and you can tell by what is highlighted in the inspect element mode).
You can also hit delete in inspect element mode to remove that element. You can also edit whatever you want in the element. Makes me wish it existed back when I was doing more web dev work, would have made things a lot easier when debugging.
(Sorry for the late response.) Well it depends a lot on the site. Since I focus on books and scholarly articles, the ideal way is to find the URL of the original PDF. The website might show you just individual pages as images, but it might hide the link to the PDF somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you might just obtain all the URLs of the individual page images, put them all into a download manager, and later bundle them all into a new PDF. (When you open the “inspect element” window, you just have to figure out which part of the code is meant to display the pages/images to you.) Sometimes the PDFs and page images can be found in your browser cache, as I mention in the OP. There’s quite some variety among the different sites, but with even the most rudimentary knowledge of web design you should be able to figure out most of them.
If need help with ripping something in particular, DM me and I’ll give it a try.
deleted by creator
Not true in the US, but commonly stated by Americans like it’s fact.
That sadly isn’t true everywhere. Here in Germany (and I suspect large parts of the EU) downloading/streaming copyrighted content without license used to be a grey area but has been completely illegal for a few years now.
Of course, VPNs are perfectly legal.
They aren’t going after the hoarders, they are going after the sharers.
