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)
According to the big tech its ok if you’re training large language model with it.
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.
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.
