Is a mere downloading and private storage of publicly accessible (copyrighted) visual assets also illegal?
I think in most places you can store such content for personal use without infringing the law. I can imagine collecting icons for research purposes might be a valid and perfectly legal use-case here, just like making offline copies of webpages or basically archiving anything (?)
Btw, Firefox for example allows you to grab all media from the displayed page (just not those pesky inline SVGs like this extension can) with few keystrokes: Page Info (Ctrl+I) > Media (Alt+M) > Select All (Alt+E) > Save As (Alt+A) > (Enter). ("Page Info" is also under Tools (Alt+T) menu.)
Probably not, and I'm not saying the tool is bad or anything like that, just wondering what people might use it for. Tools like DownThemAll make sense to me; they're used by end-users who may wish to violate copyright, if it even is copyright violation. I don't mind.
But I don't think a lot of people keep a collection of SVGs for personal usage. Me, personally, I only collect SVGs if I intend to use them in a product I'm working on, which is often commercial, and means violating copyright becomes a business risk.
Btw, Firefox for example allows you to grab all media from the displayed page (just not those pesky inline SVGs like this extension can) with few keystrokes: Page Info (Ctrl+I) > Media (Alt+M) > Select All (Alt+E) > Save As (Alt+A) > (Enter). ("Page Info" is also under Tools (Alt+T) menu.)