Facebook threatening Greasemonkey writer
by: Bradley Wint on March 26th, 2010 at 11:14 am
If you are a member of Facebook, you must have encountered the annoying posts on your feed such as Cafe World, Farmville, Fishville and the number of other stupid quizzes that predict your future. A Greasemonkey script was developed to block these annoying feed posts, called Facebook Purity. Facebook did not like this and threatened legal action, citing copyright infringement because of the use of the name “Facebook”. I guess they took action because the script did something negative to the Facebook website.
The Facebook Purity fan page was also deleted very soon after. However, this did not stop the Greasemonkey writers. They created a new page and called the script “Fluff Busting Purity“. Turns out that was still not good enough, this time because it blocked content but from the browser’s end. The script functions as part of the web browser, blocking out the pointless posts, not having any effect on Facebook’s server or blocking any IP address routing of any nature. Ad Block Plus for Firefox does a similar job in Firefox by hiding almost all adverts on websites on the browser’s end. Perfectly legal in my opinion.
As much as Facebook may complain, a user has the right to filter out whatever content they choose to, once it is on their end, so we wish Facebook good luck with their legal matters since they definitely will be getting no where with it.
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