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.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.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.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.[1]
http://www.knowmad.law/single-post/scraping