Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.

Babak Nivi posts a good explanation of Greasemonkey from a no-need-to-be-javascript-savvy frame of mind. I like what I’ve seen in greasemonkey so far, and I think Nivi’s metaphor of mashing up websites is a good one.

Here’s a concern of mine, though. I’m more than slightly worried about Nivi’s 2^nd prediction. A year ago who would have thought that something like Greasemonkey (or AJAX) would come along. I’m sure there were people who did, but my point is that Nivi’s statement:

And how are they going to stop me? Sue the guy that made the Greasemonkey script? Block my IP address from using Netflix?

fails to take into account the ingenuity of developers or the foolishness of corporate legal departments.

Netflix may just find a way to block Greasemonkey scripts; it’s far from unimaginable. And if they do it, will that “solution” propogate across more and more commercial sites? What happens to the usefulness of Greasemonkey then?

And what about lawsuits? Some unwise CEO of a business that sees itself as getting trampled by Greasemonkey could very well pull an RIAA, and even if not successful could make thing annoying for a while.

I guess my point is that I hope for Greasemonkey script writers to be sensitive to the potentially copyright-infringing (like Nivi’s 5^th script idea of BitTorrentizing Netflix pages) nature of their scripts.

via Greasemonkey, Ajax, and the future of the web | MetaFilter