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Greasemonkey Script Authors have been threatened before and they will continue to be threatened until one of them actually takes the threats to court (and wins)
by moeffju 17y ago
Greasemonkey Script Authors have been threatened before and they will continue to be threatened until one of them actually takes the threats to court (and wins).
In the beginning of userscripts.org, I hosted the domain in Germany, which opened up a whole other can of worms since it was not yet clear whether the domain owner could be held responsible for user-posted content. A bunch of people and companies complained and sent legal threats until we finally decided to transfer the domain to the US, where the law was a little saner.
I would be interested in a legal analysis. To me, it seems logical that I can do whatever I want with data in my browser's memory. But the law might not agree with my hacker's intuition.
- teej 17y agoI'd like to point out that in this case Facebook is only pursuing trademark issues. They have not asked the author to take down the script. They asked him to change his name from "Facebook Purity". He changed it to "FB Purity". Facebook says that's not good enough. I'm inclined to agree.
- barrkel 17y agoAnd I guess the fact you didn't mention your obvious conflict of interest in this specific case is perfectly cromulent, eh?
- nym 17y agoAhem, "Fluff Busting Purity"... you could also call it "Fluff BP", but then British Petroleum might get upset too.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- _delirium 17y agoDo they really even have a trademark case here? It seems there's very little likelihood of confusion between "Facebook Purity", a Greasemonkey script, and "Facebook", a social-networking website. If it were a violation, then the hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts that use the trademarked names "Wikipedia" and "Google" in their titles, to indicate that they somehow change the display of Wikipedia and Google, respectively, must also be running afoul of trademark law.