What the sites will eventually have to learn is that the customer can do whatever they want once the data hits their computer and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. (Contrary to what the big companies would have you believe, lawsuits are actually counter-productive because they make people say ‘Whoa! You can do that?!’)

I think when I published this Greasemonkey wasn’t hooking in to Firefox quite as deeply, but I haven’t been paying as much attention to the developer’s mailing list as I might, so I could be wrong.

In any case I think that reinforces my point about script writiers needing to be savvy about how they infringe - I could definitely see lawsuits in the works - not that do anything other than be a headache, but….

1. Greasemonkey hooks into Firefox at the Chrome level (The ultra-privileged Javascript that much of the browser is written in) and so it’s impossible to truly beat it. It gets access to the site’s code before the JS is run and it’s hooks ignore any site-level attempts to obfuscate the DOM. (thanks to XPCNativeWrappers)

2. BitTorrentizing NetFlix isn’t the only thing out there. I’ve seen at least two scripts to provide direct links to The Pirate Bay and Mininova from IMDB movie entries.

Cheers

Cori’s got me trying Greasemonkey today. I’m reeling with the possibilities. Here’s Cori’s sum of it’s future and a few concerns he have, in response to this prophetic piece. The only auto-scripting tool I’ve used is ActiveWords, which I now