I feel it's reasonable for the average person to figure that a plugin that pays them for using Facebook and Twitter is paying for the data generated from those sessions. There is already a case with LinkedIn where courts are allowing data scraping even though LinkedIn disallows it and forced LinkedIn to stop blocking it.

I feel like this is a case Facebook should lose. Facebook wants complete ownership of the data from Facebook for marketing purposes because obviously if they're the only ones that have the data they have a monopoly. But preventing others from gathering competing data seems to be a breach of Antitrust. And Facebook execs will openly admit this is what they're doing. They've shut down multiple influencer related companies who completely backed down from a cease and desist from Facebook. And they're refusing to allow anyone to grant influencer agencies access to their data. This is Facebook telling people who they can give their data to. As well as Facebook saying companies can't scrape public information and then sell the statistics. And statistics can't be copyrighted.

Courts only said "If your server responds to an unauthenticated GET request, that's on you". Linkedin is free to stop providing that data or move it behind a login wall, they just don't want to because it helps them with SEO. Contrast that with these plugins that are absolutely accessing data behind the user's login.

Also with regards to the antitrust assertions you make, Facebook is absolutely not required to share their data with anyone. People give their data to FB, FB can do what they want with it (as long as it's within the ToS). Facebook can't stop me from also giving my data to someone else outside the platform, but they do not have to facilitate that process in any way.

Yes, exactly. Basically saying if LinkedIn was providing the data they couldn't block the data for specific people. In contrast, these plugins are collecting data that someone has chosen to make available to them. This is Facebook attempting to stop people from giving data to their competitors. This is anti-competitive. Overall the LinkedIn case said that if the user made that data available then that is on them. Not that it was an unauthenticated request, but that the data was made public and there was no attempt to bypass any privacy filters.

> Also with regards to the antitrust assertions you make, Facebook is absolutely not required to share their data with anyone. People give their data to FB, FB can do what they want with it (as long as it's within the ToS). Facebook can't stop me from also giving my data to someone else outside the platform, but they do not have to facilitate that process in any way.

One of Facebook's services is to provide that data to other services so you can use those services with that data. Saying no you can't share that data and not provide you that data in export is well, anti-competitive. This is saying "No, we don't want you to give those people that data." This is anti-competitiveness. Suing companies and preventing them from competing is predatory. You make claims that Facebook doesn't have to do these things, I feel like Facebook should be forced to allow these things. Just like we force Facebook to do other things like delete user data or make user data available (which it actually isn't doing completely last time I checked because you can't export your data and then have the exact same data on your own system.)

I suspect that, to date, you've mostly met above-average people.

The average person, in my experience, has no such expectation or understanding. All they know is "free money!"

Facts aren't copyrightable, but a collection of facts might be if there was sufficient creativity involved in the selection and arrangement of the facts.

The big case on this was Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), where a company copying a telephone book was found not to be if infringing because the phone book was not be copyrighted.

The Court ruled that there is a constitutional requirement for at least some minimal degree of creativity in a work for it to be copyrighted. In the case of a phone book, neither the selection criteria (everyone in this region who has a phone) nor the arrangement (alphabetical order by name).

The Court also noted that if there is sufficient creativity in the selection or arrangement to support copyright, the copyright would be on that selection and arrangement. The underlying facts would still be uncopyrightable. In the case of the phone book, for example, that would mean that even if Rural had used a creative arrangement and could copyright that, Feist could still take all the names and phone numbers and produce its alphabetical phone book from them.

Applying this to Facebook, it may be that they do have copyright in the selection and arrangement of facts that were scraped. Whether or not the scraper is infringing would hinge on what they did with those facts.

The White Pages are not copyright-able, which is what your case describes. But the Yellow Pages are copyright-able (somewhat). This is because grouping the businesses into categories clears the bar of "minimal degree of creativity" that you mention. However, the individual listings are still not subject to copyright so there's no problem with taking them and re-arranging them.

I don't think the scraping companies could mount a successful fair use defense so they'd definitely be found to be infringing and could be ordered by a court to stop. What damages they might pay would depend on what they did with the data.

That seems to be an important difference, no?

These extensions are made by shitty companies using shitty practices to make money. If current legal frameworks aren't well suited to deal with it, that doesn't make them any less shitty.

You're just a pawn sitting in the middle while the parties to this fight over who gets to exploit you most effectively. The only positive outcome here would be if the courts hugely overstepped their mandate and told everyone involved that this data shouldn't be available at all, you have to destroy it now.

Facebook is harmed through resource consumption by the scraping, the infringement of any copyrights they hold on what's scraped, and potentially harmed in their relationship with their advertising customers and their users.

How bad Facebook's own practices are is irrelevant to the issue of what these extension makers have done. Dirtbags have rights too.

Not to sue Facebook or the extension author and definitely not for Facebook to sue the extension author.

I agree but that's not happening in this case.

Even if the specific act of letting the extension run is the fault of each user and presumably means they each violated Facebook's ToS, they can probably sue the extension makers for bribing the users to violate the ToS.

That's an interesting thought. A ToS is just a (rather questionable, in many cases) contract. Can party A sue party C for bribing party B to violate a contract between A and B? Genuine question - I honestly don't know, but my guess is no.