Mirth :: Is it legal?

A URL is simply an address, open to the public, like the street address of a building, which, if known, can enable the user to reach the building. (Ticketmaster vs. Microsoft, 1997)

Mirth is, essentially, a web browser with a very aggressive ad blocker (that is, it blocks everything except the one image you are interested in looking at). Viewing images using Mirth is no different than viewing them in any other browser.

Of course, the websites providing these comics rely on advertising revenue, and therefore they do not want anyone to be able to view those images unaccompanied by ads. Web scrapers such as Mirth have been involved in legal battles in the past, but most of these cases involved websites with contents that "bots" harvested from other sites. Mirth is different because it is only a browser, and it retrieves the comic images directly from the sites that provide them.

Web sites such as those that these comics come from have an interesting dilemma: they want to let you to view these images, but only if in the process you also are forced, at least in passing, to look at advertisements as well. Different sites try different methods to enforce this. Wrapping the comics inside Flash animations is the most common method. Other sites randomize the image names (to keep a program from guessing the name for a certain date). Still others examine the HTTP referer header to determine what page the image is embedded in.

It is quite possible that future changes made by these sites will make the current version of Mirth stop working. In particular, I haven't looked into methods of extracting images from Flash animations (but if you're a programmer with some free time, perhaps you'd like to give it a try now that .swf has been made into an open standard.).