Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool
As a background, the problematic part of Facebook’s policy is that, while end-users are the owner of all content they produce, they [Facebook] essentially consider all their HTML their copyright. They have argued in court (and won [1]) that scraping essentially requires creating an in-memory copy of this HTML before the user-produced content can be extracted, and thus is a violation of their copyright.<p>It’s a very unfortunate precedent in my opinion, that limits pretty much all forms of scraping. Copyright law should not be abused for this, but yet here we are.<p>If the Knight’s institute manages to get Facebook to amend their policy that is a great step in the right direction, but I feel that copyright should not be abused to restrict scraping like this: the copyrightable content is not what is being scraped at all, it is immediately thrown away after the user-produced content is extracted.<p>This means there is no way for a user to even legally get their own content extracted from Facebook this way, and on top of that, web browser make in-memory copies of Facebook’s HTML all the time; heck, they even specifically instruct browsers and proxies to cache a lot of their content.<p>[1]
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