I stumbled across a question today that was right up my street: How do I grab video from webofstories.com?. If I were to paraphrase it it would be:

I want to download videos from a video streaming site that doesn't provide download links.

Everything about this is tailored for me. As part of ${DAYJOB} I do an amount of video streaming work. I know the ins, the outs and the otherwises of RTMP and I'm very familiar with the various utilities that allow you to download the content as I've used them for testing various encrypted setups.

My technical, helpful site took over and in about a minute I had an answer, including a full example on how to download one of their videos. I was about to click the submit button when I heard a voice in the back of my head asking some uncomfortable questions:

• Are they allowed to do this?
• Is it technically illegal to do this?
• Am I allowed to show them how to do this?

The facts here are it's not an open license for the videos and the terms and conditions clearly state the only way they license the videos to you is via the website (and no other mechanism).

We nuke any question we see about people trying to circumvent DRM. It's illegal under the DMCA so it's not welcome here. This isn't the same as that but it is legally questionable.

More than that, I'm acutely aware of the costs of hosting and streaming video, especially through Amazon S3/Cloudfront. It's not a cheap CDN. This sort of question makes me uncomfortable on the level that if I give somebody a viable answer, they could very easily use a cheap home broadband connection to cost this company hundreds of dollars in extra streaming costs.

And what if this was a question about a site where all this was okay? An answer would be legally fine but it could easily be adapted for use on another site where it is against terms of service.

This is just one example and I'm already pretty conflicted about how we should deal with it. Part of me feels like it might be somebody just trying to do something and the other side feels like helping them is akin to teaching somebody how to most effectively graffiti a wall.

I'd like to hear what other people think about legally and morally questionable content. Please feel free to give examples (real or not) to illustrate your thoughts.

I stumbled across a question today that was right up my street: How do I grab video from webofstories.com?. If I were to paraphrase it it would be:

I want to download videos from a video streaming site that doesn't provide download links.

Everything about this is tailored for me. As part of ${DAYJOB} I do an amount of video streaming work. I know the ins, the outs and the otherwises of RTMP and I'm very familiar with the various utilities that allow you to download the content as I've used them for testing various encrypted setups.

My technical, helpful site took over and in about a minute I had an answer, including a full example on how to download one of their videos. I was about to click the submit button when I heard a voice in the back of my head asking some uncomfortable questions:

• Are they allowed to do this?
• Is it technically illegal to do this?
• Am I allowed to show them how to do this?

The facts here are it's not an open license for the videos and the terms and conditions clearly state the only way they license the videos to you is via the website (and no other mechanism).

We nuke any question we see about people trying to circumvent DRM. It's illegal under the DMCA so it's not welcome here. This isn't the same as that but it is legally questionable.

More than that, I'm acutely aware of the costs of hosting and streaming video, especially through Amazon S3/Cloudfront. It's not a cheap CDN. This sort of question makes me uncomfortable on the level that if I give somebody a viable answer, they could very easily use a cheap home broadband connection to cost this company hundreds of dollars in extra streaming costs.

And what if this was a question about a site where all this was okay? An answer would be legally fine but it could easily be adapted for use on another site where it is against terms of service.

This is just one example and I'm already pretty conflicted about how we should deal with it. Part of me feels like it might be somebody just trying to do something and the other side feels like helping them is akin to teaching somebody how to most effectively graffiti a wall.

I'd like to hear what other people think about legally and morally questionable content. Please feel free to give examples (real or not) to illustrate your thoughts.