Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That could perhaps be a rather dubious activity under copyright law. It's one thing to save a website for offline reading on the device that you accessed it online; it's quite another to start making copies of that copyrighted material on other devices without the permission of the copyright holder. The fact that something is available online doesn't necessarily mean that you can just arbitrarily copy it; you need to check whether or not the material is copyrighted.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I would personally make a clear distinction between the downloading of pages by a web browser (which is a download necessary to the operation of the web browser), and the conversion of a web site into an eBook, which then has an existence entirely separate from that of the web site. The latter activity seems awfully like copyright infringement to me.
I'm not alone in this view, by the way. Caltech actively issues takedown notices to anyone who create ebooks versions of their web site which has the Feynman lectures on it ( http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu). |
Do you mean to say I am breaking the law if I print out a webpage -- unless I have specifically been given permission to do so?
As Ken said, if someone is publicly distributing copyrighted works, that is clearly illegal.
Just as clearly, the fact that they are available for my use online gives me permission to print out that page for my own personal use, on whatever medium I care to use... being as they were made available to me and all and I got them from the legal source.
DRM exists because there is no law saying I cannot do so.