Is site ripping ethical?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Say there was a guy by the name of white544. Who was scouring the web looking for a place to download a zip file of the W3C’s CSS specifications for offline viewing.

He stumbled across the site of a guy who offered the specifications for free on the web, and also sold a zip of them for those who don’t want to have to log in to view them.

White544 could go through the whole site, page by page, and save each page individually, but that would be a pain in the neck. Obviously, he’s loathe to part with the dough to get it all at once.

Now suppose white544 discovers that the site in question is available (via HTTP - no breaking and entering required) via his FTP client. This would allow him to download everything he needs at once.

Is it theft?

Is it ethical?

What if it was a porn site, and he was grabbing jpegs instead of html files?

What about those offline browsers for PDAs that will do essentially the same thing?

Your thoughts?

2

Why should you have to do that? The specs should be freely available elsewhere.

3

Of course its ethical. If they didn’t want to make it available for you, it wouldn’t be online without a password.

4

If it’s downloaded for personal use, I’d have no problem with it. When I saw the thread title, I assumed the subject was about ripping a site and publishing it on the web as your own work; that would be plagiarism and clearly wrong.