Greetings,

Facebook has sent me a Cease & Desist notice (click here to view) stating that PhotoJacker/FacePAD violates Section 3.2 of their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:

You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. (Section 3.2)

PhotoJacker/FacePAD, is in some way, a scraper, since it allows the end-user to download photos (that the user can manually download by right-clicking on the photo and pushing saved target/image as…) from Facebook to their computer in an expeditious manner. For the record, scraping is a very loosely defined term, and not all definitions I’ve read make it sound like PhotoJacker/FacePAD is a scraper.

Moving on, Facebook is extremely upset that I can achieve this photo-downloading functionality without using their API. I like to think of it as getting punished for being clever (hehe). They also think that I am exploiting some type of loophole in Facebook, which I’m not. All I do is use a few XMLHttpRequests() and some built in Firefox functions to achieve the functionality. Anyone with a bit of AJAX knowledge will attest to there being nothing malicious or wrong with this method.

I was considering  putting this code in the Public Domain, but even then, I’ll still be in some legal grey area, which is not somewhere I want to be. If someone can walk me through this procedure (and prove to me that I will not be approached again by Facebook or any other organization), I will happily release the code under any copyleft license. Contact me at arthur[at]lazyrussian[dot]com if you’d like to help.

(UPDATE: I spoke with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF - www.eff.org), and they have informed me that it would be in my best interest to not post the code anywhere in the Public Domain, for fear that I will still piss off Facebook, even though I’d relinquish my ownership rights in the process. Therefore, I have decided not to release the code to the public domain.)

Regardless, I am currently a full time student, and I really don’t have the time to deal with this problem. Therefore, I have decided to comply with Facebook’s takedown notice. The program has been removed from Mozilla, and therefore, it can no longer be accessed or downloaded.

Thanks for the last 2.5 years of fun, and for making PhotoJacker/FacePAD a top extension at Mozilla.

Peace.