Saving it to your HD doesn't make it not akin to illegal file-sharing merely because you say so.
In the examples you cite, merely viewing the content is copyright infringement. It's not clear that saving it to disk adds to the infringement (unless you then subsequently sell it or share it, of course).
On the other hand, if the online content is legal to view, then saving it on your disk is simply fair use (again, unless you publish the saved content to others without permission).
Well, like I said, I don't want to find myself taking an RIAA stance. But I thought illegal downloading was supposed to be wrong. Why? Because it's copyright infringement.
Things have changed lately, of course, but it strikes me that promoting software that is likely to be used to infringe the copyrights of others without at least mentioning this is irresponsible. That said, I'm not the copyright police, believe me.
And I'm not sure that merely viewing the content could possibly constitute the infringement, but then I don't think this sort of thing has found its way to a court of law. Seems to me it's the uploading that's the actual infringement here. Beyond that, it gets kinda theoretical & since Google acquired this site it would make sense that their due diligence produced a result where infringement will not be a large factor.
Nevertheless, if content is still being pulled, then someone owns it & doesn't want it up there. To me, it doesn't make sense that we would condemn illegal file-sharing, but we're all for this...and for pointing this out someone wants to call me names? Gee, I guess I'll just have to get over it.
Either you choose to obey the law, or you don't. In this case, the law may be murky, since it hasn't yet caught up to technology. I feel that the idea that doing a little research to make sure one is in fact not breaking the law isn't too much to ask to mention in a thread like this.