They only sell these as a convenience to people without the internet....they were selling these on tapes before that and then there wasn't internet. They didn't care if you copied the tapes back then. They have a library now where you can borrow (for free) sermon cds and copy them if you want.

When I went to the site, I found myself saying, "why didn't they make their archives available for download like my church...this church in question came out of my church"? Then I remembered how under staffed my church is and that every week there is a request for IT people (volunteer or low paying) to manage my church's website. I'd imagine this church in question has the same problem of lack of people power. The fact that they only have 31 of the pastor's 100s of sermons online makes me think they need help in the IT area.

They have not hidden any of their URL download links except that you have to have flash to see the links. If they were hidden links I would doubt my reasoning. I did email them with the question of why the archives aren't available on the web but don't think I'll hear back from them soon if they are lacking in the computer people area.

Well, if you're sure of this then by all means carry on (up to and including asking). Understand we have to be very careful about these sorts of things particularly when, as you say, it appears that a site is woefully understaffed. Sometimes sites have pretty tightly restricted bandwidth quotas, and a few people pummeling their website 50x more than "normal" can easily convince them that the Internet is going to be too much trouble for them to bear. You can never be sure what the non-techies are going to make of sudden and dramatic deviations from "normal" use patterns, if they notice.

URLs not directly published are the same as "hidden" in the eyes of the legal system, which is where the waters get murky. This actually used to be a fairly dodgy question; how far the "implied invitation" to visit a site went, and in some cases, whether or not it existed at all. There's no implied invitation for unpublished (guessed at) URLs, but no judges have put anyone in jail on this point yet (that I'm aware of) as mainly pragmatism that some form of access control should be in place seems to win out at the right times. In the case of this church group (with the added benefit of hearing what you're saying about their origin and so forth) an implied invitation can probably be assumed.

I barked a bit at first there because in almost all other cases someone using a flash app to throttle accessing the media would definitely indicate a lack of an implied invitation to make copies (not to mention the ethical consideration), and a judge would likely decide against you. I worry for LQ that they're going to wind up getting nastygrams because someone's going to say some stuff that would be on the wrong side of the grey are when the contrast is turned up or I'd have not bothered to say a thing about it. (No joke, I know other site opers who have gotten notices for cr*p like this that was only marginally beyond the pale.)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I just get hassled by the feds more often than I'd rather so it behooves me to pay close attention to the lay of the legal landscape.