Free Online Tool Converts Sites to PDF

Thanks for the tip on conversions of web pages into PDF.

neato =)

That's awesome!

And I have the same questions as in your PS. :(

This type of functionality has some great benefits, but unfortunately it violates Gather's Terms of Service (TOS).

As per the Terms of Service, members agree they will not: use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application, or other device to retrieve or index any portion of the Service or collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose.

There are other services that are equally beneficial and benign for us as members, but Gather has recently changed their views on their use, and requested that all documentation supporting such services be removed. :-(

OK Kevin, thanks for the update. I have a rather lenthy response to your kind note that I hope will be able to respond to further.

I don't really understand how this fits the terms you mention above: it is not a search AND retrieval application, the searching has to be done by a person who finds the gather page. It is not an indexing routine, and I don't see how printing a PDF of my own copyrighted articles is collecting information about users (I could see that this might be the case if comments were included, but it is a stretch if the user has granted permission for comments to be quoted (under fair use in copyright law, they can probably be quoted to some extent anyway).

There has been so much written about copyright problems with information posted on Gather, and Gather's stated unwillingness to to action unless presented with what many of us feel to be an unreasonable amount of documentation, that this seemed like a useful tool. It allows independent documentation of publication dates, which is apparently important because Gather publication dates are a matter of confusion for some us in this community (they can change, not necessarily under our control).

Frankly, if we own the copyrights of our own material here, which Gather claims all over the place that we do, then, with the exception of the comments from others, I don't see how the TOS can legally prevent us from exercising our rights to our own material. So does this mean that the TOS is a statement that we do not own the copyrights of our own work published here?

Furthermore, there is no difference between using this program (mentioned in the article) to generate a PDF and simply printing a page from Gather: they both go through exactly the same process of using a program to translate the gather page into a format that can be read by another program, for display via a printer or a PDF reader. In fact, many PDF creation programs act exactly like printers, and simply have to be chosen instead of a physical printer to generate the desired PDF. Anything printed physically can be scanned with optical character reader capability to reproduce the original text. You seem to be telling me that I can't do any of these things with my own copyrighted material. If you are telling me something different, please elaborate.

So, I may have to drop out of Gather if it can (a) fail to take sufficient interest in pursuing copyright violations and (b) tries to tell me what I can and can't do with my own copyrighted material.

I would appreciate further clarification on these copyright matters and how Gather can control information that it does not own the copyright to, by any means, regardless of what the TOS says. If the TOS violates copyright law, which it is sounding to me that it does, then it isn't a valid legal document, anyway, from my amateur legal perspective. If Gather is misrepresenting the issue of who owns the copyrights by stating that the authors do, but then contradicting this elsewhere, then the legal ground seems pretty unstable to me.

Thanks again for any clarifications that you can provide. Best wishes.

Kevin, as an additional comment:

As far as I know, people who are not members of Gather.com can read any publicly-published articles found on gather.com (as opposed to something available only to members of a certain group). So, anyone from the general public could use the PDF creation routine mentioned above because they would not be bound by the TOS. This gives people a ready way to copy our copyrighted material when we don't have that right ourselves, according to my understanding of what you said above. Again, any clarification would be appreciated.

Jim, this is an important subject.

There was a situation where someone else on Gather felt one of my articles was plagiarized by an author on another site and complained to Gather about it. I only became aware of the situation when I received a copy of his complaint. My feeling at the time, however, was that it was an exception, and, in fact, I haven't been aware of such a thing since.

You say that Gather claims all over the place that we own our material. What confuses me, a little, is why do you think that it may not be true.

Thanks for the info, Jim. Good post.

Interesting James.

Thanks for all of the feedback.

Dave: I guess I don't understand how I can own the copyright to something if I don't have the legal right to print a copy of it by any means I see fit. It sounds like I own the copyright, at best, in name only, but that all actual rights are owned by Gather.

I don't claim to be an expert, so I would be glad if someone could explain more of this situation to me.

Best wishes!

James,

I suggest that if you have questions you contact Gather for clarification on their policy, through email at support@gather.com. This is not a copyright issue. You own your content and can do with your content as you see fit. However, it is the manner in which the content is being accessed which is a violation. Gather has recently enforced this segment of the TOS which applies to any method of retrieving content on Gather, whether you own that content or not.

You can print and look at your own page, but using a service to do so constitutes the violation.

I am very disappointed in this ruling as well, but recent changes in how Gather calculates page views now allows this type of service to manipulate the 'Most Read/Viewed ' listings...where they didn't previously. This can also impact earnings on the site. Hence, Gather needs to limit their usage.

James, I don't have any answers for you either, but I don't see what you're describing as a copyright issue. You can publish your work anywhere, anytime, as you please; you own the material/content. I see this being more of technical, software issues specific to the site (not the content). But I can understand your confusion and disappointment, as this would have been a handy tool to use.

Kevin: Good to know. Thanks.

Kevin: I appreciate your kind clarification and patient response. I can understand some of the issues but I still don't see the problem with this particular program. It is not a service, per se. One can only paste a url into the program manually, one url at a time, or one can invoke the program by navigating to a web page (manually, one at a time). So, it doesn't search or index, and I just don't see how it differs my my using the file menu, selecting print, and then selecting my printer or the program PDF Redirect version 2. There are almost the same number of steps involved, but the new program is more convenient. It is not, however, any kind of automated bot that searches pages without human intervention.

I take it that the reason why nobody can find articles on gather, unless they belong to gather.com or have specifically been directed to a page by a gather member, is that spiders and bots are forbidden. If so, this simply keeps our content from the world and is why I only republish here, for the most part, after publishing on my own blogs or at an online magazine that now accepts my articles (they must think I am related to the editor). Is there a reason why Gather doesn't want to be a primary destination for web users? I think I'm missing the whole point of why this site exists.

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interesting....
thanks James....

James,

I can certainly understand the confusion on this subject!

On the surface this service may appear to be the same as simply printing a page from your browser. However, it is actually a page retrieval service since you are entering a URL, and this site is retrieving the page and performing some type of processing on it.

Based upon Gather's new stance on this type of activity, any website or program where you need to enter a URL would be a violation. This differs from printing a page displayed in your browser via the available options on your browser's toolbar.

I hope that helps a little...

Kevin, Thanks for the continued patient explanations.

Hi James,
Your article was brought to my attention and I'd like to comment to hopefully clear up any confusion you may have. Kevin's comments above are correct. First, YOU own the copyright to your own content that is posted on Gather. Additionally, the program you reference above is not permitted on Gather because programs like this affect site statistics and overall site experience negatively.

Thanks for the additional clarification, MaryAnne. Best wishes!

Sure thing James.

I too would like to be able to edit my comments. Thank you for this handy information.