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Is it illegal to download things that aren't meant to be downloaded? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just check the reviews, or the permissions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.