OK, fair enough. But why does Facebook allow you to import data from other web services, like Gmail, but disallow you to export data from their database?

If they're going to be petty about that, Scoble's pettiness is justified in my mind.

What is true 'de jure' may not be true 'de facto'.

With technologies available to suck your information back out of Facebook (the new versions of which will presumably evade detection), and plenty of people happy to use them, the legalities of information ownership will be irrelevant.