Legality of keeping an offline cache of a website

[gsk]

I was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me:

 

 

 

1) is it legal to cache and store an entire website for offine browsing?

 

 

 

2)are there any caveats to this regarding subscription websites?

 

 

 

Practical example:

 

 

 

I have a 2 day free trial to a news website. I want to view it offline at my leisure, so I put a website cacheing program to work and store it all on my laptop/server. I might also want to keep the offline data for more than the 2 days. What are the legalities surrounding this?

 

 

Regards,

 

gsk

[SimpleSi]

No idea legally - morally - if you trying to bypass a pay for content website then its not right is it?

Si

[SteveBentley]

I think saving a few pages is probably going to be ok (as in view a page and do a save as). Spidering the whole site is perhaps more objectionable.

 

Caching pages that have already been viewed is the accepted model of how the web works (caching proxy servers, browser caches) so there's plenty of precedent for that being standard practice and by putting that on the web you're inviting people to do that.

 

Using software to trawl the site, I guess you could make a case that if there isn't a robots.txt file at the root of the site disallowing it then it's fair game (it's what Google does, after all) but that's much murkier water, and IANAL!

[SneakyBeaky]

Discussion (but rather old) here:

A Nevada federal court has ruled that the cached versions of Web pages that Google stores and offers as a part of many search results are not copyright infringement.

Google "Cache" Not Copyright Violation Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld

[AngryTechnician]

I have a 2 day free trial to a news website. I want to view it offline at my leisure, so I put a website cacheing program to work and store it all on my laptop/server. I might also want to keep the offline data for more than the 2 days. What are the legalities surrounding this?

The T&Cs of the site probably prohibit this. The Times, for example, clearly prohibits it on page 2 of their T&Cs.