I recently got an email from a software company I have done business with in the past. They’ve been around for at least ten years, maybe more. I’d purchased a printing utility from them that I found to be quite useful, so I allowed them to send new product announcements. Their newest offerings are two similar products that allow one to download the entire contents of a website for browsing offline.
Since they are a legit company, I can only assume this is not illegal. Or is it? I mean, if you wanted to, you COULD dowload every bit of the website and reconstruct it yourself. The stuff’s in your temporary internet folder anyway (depending on how your browser is set up, at least).
As long as it isn’t bypassing any security provisions, I don’t see how it could be a breach of legal thingybob (IANAL, can you tell?)
It is as you say merely an automation tool. What could be a grey area is if it has a function to scan through combos looking for foldernames to grope around areas of their site that while not protected might not be public (altho afaik if you can get to it, it’s public).
It’s perfectly legal. IE can do that too, though many people don’t realize it. It isn’t quite as selective, but you can save most or all of a site for offline browsing.
There was a question about this here on the SDMB in which a Mod mentioned that the use of such software here was to be frowned upon. Sorry, I don’t recall exactly when.
I think you must have misunderstood something. It makes no sense. why would it be illegal? It just makes no sense. If I put pages up on my web site for people to see how can I camplain if someone wants to see them all? It makes not sense. BTW, Google and other search engines do exactly that. They have bots crawling the Net and caching every page they find.
Can you explain what makes you believe it might be illegal?
I’d bet money that the concern there was less one of legality and more one of server loading. Imagine the load if all 30,000 members decided to download every single thread on the boards. The boards would become all but inaccessible for quite some time.
The concern was, obviously, one of bandwidth and server load but there is nothing a website can do legally if you decide to download every one of their pages. If you did it over a 56k connection and during night hours when the load is small, the load would not even be noticeable.
Without discussing the legality of such software (I honestly have no reason to believe that it’s illegal), yeah, we’d frown on people downloading, say, the entire message board for offline browsing purposes. At most hours of the day, our hardware is at maximum capacity as it is. If someone decided to do a mass download, it would seriously slow things down for other users.
So: illegal? I don’t know.
To be used here? Most definitely not.