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?
AFAIK web scraping (the act of grabbing and downloading any data you see available on the internet) isn’t illegal, and I would assume downloading PDFs provided to you online would fall under that. Since it is copyrighted it would probably be illegal to share it, though.
This. In a case around LinkedIn courts ruled that in the US it’s legal to scrape publicly available data. The company doing the scraping was selling that data to corporate customers, but ultimately use might depend on the information you’re accessing and under what permissions. (Not a lawyer)
What if I web scraped something like a pirate site full of all the good media?
If you scraped a pirate site and stored a bunch of links to copyrighted content you’d probably be fine, actually using those links to download or share copyrighted content is what’s illegal. It’d be like buying the stuff to make a bomb or drugs, but then not making any bombs or drugs.
That being said, while not necessarily illegal, I wouldn’t want authorities to find my bomb and drug ingredients, or my scraped piracy links, as I’d probably have some 'splainin to do.
(Not a lawyer)
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
There’s a law for the ruling class? I always figured they gotta just cut their political buddies in.
My brain is essentially an enormous language model.
Unironically yes, you would not know who Spiderman was without viewing a copyrighted work demonstrating what he looks like, and now you understand while generative AI fundamentally has to ingest copyrighted works.
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
If you can see it, you’ve already downloaded it. You’re just chosing to retain it.
You wouldn’t download a car…
Nooo never…
You’re right! Babies take way too much work to raise properly.
You might not.
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”.
It’s ridiculous that Homeland Security is spending resources taking down pirate sites. That’s a department specifically created to prevent terrorism, and instead they’re operating as Pinkertons for broadcasting companies.
The laws are bullshit and shouldn’t be followed. Information should be free to all
I never said I follow the law, I’m just wondering what the law says ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
You care more than all of the ‘AI’ companies combined
If it’s in the public domain, it’s almost certainly legal. I don’t have the general answer to your question.
Really this question shows how outdated copyright law is; in many countries it prohibits “copying”, but in the age of computers nearly all accessing of information involves “copying” it in some way.
Everything on the Internet can be downloaded, copied etc
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 obfuscste.
