Ouch, sorry, I thought it was the right thing to do, on the balance. Like you said, it's a really morally gray decision, either way, but I think it's actually worse to do nothing.
Just… don't dance around your motivations here. You want to build a better service, and you need CL's data for that. CL doesn't want you to use their data. You said that's too bad.
That's all there is to say.
You are free to post the same listing to as many other sites as you want; Craigslist doesn't demand exclusivity. In that regard, your listing remains yours. You have no other claim to the posting on Craiglist itself.
Not so fast. The full objection that people have with spammers isn't that the spammers have their email address. It's exactly how the email is used which comprises what people object to.
I've been looking at Padmapper, and as far as I can tell, they are basically providing a better interface to Craigslist largely by aggregating data that Craigslist doesn't claim to own.
Specifically how is Padmapper competing with Craigslist? How would such a mechanism not also apply to Google News, reddit, HN and various news sites? Is a "search bar" extension in Firefox competing with Google?
So they avoid touching Craigslist's servers by having a middleman do the touching for them.
It’s his bass and your money, but the reason you knew he had a bass to sell was the store. Likewise, it’s “your” listing data, but the reason padmapper is able to hire someone in the third world to read the internet and manually screen scrape the data—or whatever it is they’re going to do—is because craigslist aggregated it for them.
This is very similar to the kerfuffle over allegations that Bing was scraping results from Google rather than organically indexing the web. It’s quite possibly legal, but it’s not particularly admirable.
And I join Phil (disclosure: He once called me a “giant,” so I owe him) in suggesting that arguments that the ends justify the means are suspect.
I’d prefer to see the padmapper folks put up a pirate flag and openly declare war on craigslist. Just come right out and call them the evil empire already.
Perhaps the best moral decision (perhaps), but probably not the best business decision.
Man in the arena, etc.
Here's where the rubber meets the road. As far as I can tell, 3taps is taking data out of the Google Cache and re-aggregating it. While stealing someone's aggregation of data is clearly wrong, re-aggregating data from public sources clearly isn't, both from a legal and moral sense, at least in the US.
The material facts in each ad are public data. The fact that such an ad appeared on Craigslist with such facts is also public data.
> And I join Phil...in suggesting that arguments that the ends justify the means are suspect.
I'm also suspicious of ends justifying the means, but that isn't the whole story here.
> I’d prefer to see the padmapper folks put up a pirate flag and openly declare war on Craigslist. Just come right out and call them the evil empire already.
To me, Craigslist is the one being selfish and shortsighted here. If they back legislation seeking ownership rights over re-aggregation of data, that would be an "evil empire" move. It would be better for everyone if they subvert Padmapper instead of fighting it.
That was just my immediate reaction. You sound like you're alright.
Let's be frank and direct: you're being a dick to Craigslist, and you're doing it so you can build a better product.
I even agree with that decision--Craigslist has brought it upon itself by creating what is (IMO) a mediocre and clearly substandard UI. But your choice is what it is. Embrace it.
The material facts of a listing on Craigslist don't belong to Craigslist. You can't copyright the fact that a given listing is for $2400 a month. You can't copyright that it's at a given street and cross-street and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms on the premises. I don't even think anyone should copyright the aggregate of the above data. To do so would be evil. (In that there would be widespread implications.)
It's not their data. It's their listing. Those are two different things.
Are you saying that Craigslist doesn't own the data, but it still owns the aggregation of the data?
But once you get down to arguing "yes, I have a legal right to use this data, as your attorney can see by looking at section VI.A.5.b of the Online Bullshit Act," you've already given up the game. Legal arguments are ones that are essentially saying "I have government violence backing me up." Padmapper likely does.
But if that's what it's coming down to, it doesn't change the fact that Craigslist is being screwed. Maybe they had it coming and maybe it's good for the grand moral arc of human history, but whatever: they provided the forum and a way to structure and organize all that data, and without that structure it'd be hard to pick out the signal from the noise of the internet.
I am not arguing from that standpoint. I'm thinking about the implications for the freedom of data.
You are essentially saying that anyone who has done work resulting in the aggregation of public data somehow "owns" or holds the rights to the aggregation of that data. By this same logic, the first company that published a general-interest encyclopedia would own the general concept of the same aggregation of data. That can't be right, otherwise there could only be one encyclopedia in the world. By the same token, the current search companies own the reference graph of the web, and anyone who starts another web crawler is in violation.
In so far as what Padmapper is doing is the re-aggregation of already public data, he has to be in the clear, otherwise the concept of "owning" an aggregation of data becomes restrictive.
Now, I'm not commenting on whether their behavior is justified or not; I'm merely talking about the role of the government in this particular case.
Even if this phrase served your larger argument regarding Craigslist's moral position -- and I don't think it does, given that thus far, Craigslist is really the first to threaten to make this a matter requiring state enforcement -- it'd still be a bit mixed up.
A legal argument -- like any other argument -- can be about persuasion based on established principles instead of compulsion. In fact, that's essentially all it is through the point the parties involved are subject to an arbiter whose decision is still essentially based in the relative persuasiveness of the arguments.
It's true that at the stage where a ruling is either ignored by an unhappy party or enforced by another party, violence of one form or another may be required (if there is to be a system where there's enforcement -- and not all systems choose this). But between that point and the "legal argument" stage, there's enough of a buffer zone grounded in discussion that any easy equivalence between the argument and violence itself should make a careful thinker suspicious.
In the UK and EU, database rights do exist, although Padmapper could argue that Craig's List makes no investment in actually compiling the database since listings are user submitted (as opposed to the investment they continually make keeping the database accessible).
So are you saying that if CL had a more elegant UI you would be against the OP continuing agasinst CL's wishes? Seems like very arbitrary ethics.
(1) In the Objectivist/Randian sort of way, not in a negative way.
1) that the only thing that a company such as this could be doing with their value/income is building "an elegant UI" (it seems an insulting stretch to believe that their 30 employees are just sipping martinis at their office; one would imagine that there are complex social management problems that Craigslist has become experienced with and spends most of their time managing)
2) that "an elegant UI" provides positive value to this type of interaction (there have been reasonable arguments in previous PadMapper v. Craigslist posts that, in fact, the UI provided by CL is semantically more optimal than competitors providing fields; part of this argument hinged on the benefit of not requiring certain kinds of information, which makes some sense if you look at the low-key way people prefer to interact with it)
3) that there would be a long-term benefit to handing these keys to PadMapper <- this one is exceptionally bothersome due to your multiply-emphasized cry of "consequentialism"; please remember that the long-term goal of companies with this business model (I have consulted for multiple, and have multiple friends personally involved with them) is to become the portal and then marginalize the data sources as they become the new de-facto standard: in this case, PadMapper's service called PadLister.
4) that the result of this set of policies would not actually increase the number of "renter-hours" wasted, due to the (I will happily argue, but will not bother here as to me the mechanism is trivial and obvious) likely outcome that there would no longer be a centralized source for this kind of data, and renters would instead end up scouring numerous sites in the attempt to piece together who was renting what where, despite "elegant UIs". (I will point out, in case it isn't clear: I am not arguing that this is necessarily a net negative, but your position did make this assumption, so I am pointing it out)
There is absolutely no reason to believe that PadMapper would be a better long-term holder of that vision than Craigslist, and in fact numerous reasons to believe that they would actually suck at it (including, but certainly not limited to, the "this is a shady way to make this argument" comments in the parents of this part of the thread): you really have to ask yourself "who would I be happier with as ruler... Eric, Craig, or no one"?
Regardless, as I have others, I encourage you to read articles on the history of Craigslist. In this case, the article published by Wired a few years back "Why Craigslist is Such a Mess" comes to my mind as a rather key one to start with.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
People use terrible interfaces every day and even get better at using them to the point those interfaces melt away.
See a Bloomberg Terminal, see Dwarf Fortress, nethack.
I believe it's more that if CL stopped stomping on other businesses for virtually no reason, without any discussion or even possibility of an agreement, then [I] would be against the OP continuing against CL's wishes.
I am definitely biased though. I used PadMapper a ton in May when I was looking for a sublet for the summer. Last week I started browsing again for the next apartment and felt the distinct lack of CL listings. Honestly, my solution was to start using PadMapper (for non-CL listings) + another site that shows CL data on Google maps. I can't imagine going back to CL's vanilla interface for apartment searching.
In conclusion, thanks for making an awesome service and good luck with figuring something out with the Craigslist folks.
I mean, imagine I was reading the Craigslist apartment listings for my own housing search, and I knew you were looking for 3-bedroom Craigslist listings in a given neighborhood, so every time I saw one I sent you the link. Heck, imagine I even charged money for that service. In what universe am I being a dick to Craigslist? How on earth does that follow?
I understand that it's a little different here because Craigslist has asked PadMapper not to help people out that way. But the information PadMapper is passing on, it's not getting from Craigslist anymore. It's getting it from a third party. So it's the equivalent of me saying, "hey, you know you were looking for a 3-bedroom in that neighborhood? I'm not allowed to visit Craigslist myself, but a dude told me about these pages on Craigslist you might want to check out." There is purely no way that this constitutes dickish behavior toward Craigslist, and Craigslist has no moral right to forbid it.
You mean like a realtor? Maybe craigslist should go after realtors.
> "Disintermediation -- getting your users used to coming to my site to look at your data is the first step to making you irrelevant and forgettable. PM knows who the renters and the listers are; it's a small step to convince some listers to list with PM first. Maybe PM will agree to repost on CL as well, but as long as listers come to PM first, the relationship between PM and CL is flipped."
If renters go to pad mapper to find houses, and not CL, you are saying that will not impact customer and user behavior.
If renters move, then listers will too.
Your statement/line of thought does not address this aspect. Do you consider it an unlikelihood ?
Its an unstable equilibrium though, and at some point the power will tip towards PM, they will eventually eat CL.
All your objections are surmountable, it can be made technically easier. And if landlords hear of pad paper more frequently, they will go there too.
But Eric isn't you. He isn't a dick. He doesn't believe he's "fucking" Craigslist. He found a solution that fit with his own moral framework. If this doesn't fit within your framework, that's fine.
The world doesn't revolve around you. So please deal with it and stop calling him names.
...wow.
Are you seriously saying that building padmapper is a charitable act? Or am I totally misunderstanding what you said there, because...
...wow.
Last month, after spending hours filtering through CL listings to no avail, I used padmapper and found the perfect CL listed apartment in 10 minutes.
Frankly, I don't care about whether you're doing this to help people, or you want to get really filthy rich. What matters is your actions. AFAIK, you're not massively ripping me or anyone else off, you're not torturing puppies, and have no plans for world domination.
There's a long line of argument that free entreprise is actually more helpful than charity in many circumstances.
In a sense, building any company is a charitable act, because you leave consumers better off than they were before .
Are you daft?
It's not a charitable act to start a for-profit company, because you get paid for providing the service that leaves the people better off. The whole point of charities is that they provide the service without getting paid.
(If your business is a startup that has deferred monetization until later, that still doesn't make you a charity; you've just chosen to turn away payment now in the hope that doing so will yield you a bigger payment down the road.)
That's not to say that starting a business is a bad thing or that businesses can't improve the world; but there's a clear line between what a business is and what a charity is, and it involves the expectation of getting paid. Which means a business is always going to be lower on the Do-Gooder Scale than a charity is.
Or the person at a sports event selling me beer? Are they a charity? I do want beer, and they are facilitating that...for $10/glass.
(I think that most people would not consider the beer vendor a charity, and since English is a living language, I think that the cited definition is incomplete)
Crazygringo's point is that there is a much older and more important sense of "charity," which simply means helping those in need. In that sense, Google is a very charitable project. In fact it is hard to imagine a nonprofit doing a better job.
Starting a business with someone is considered the highest level.
However, I'm not sure that providing someone with a service would qualify though.
If Google didn't exist, my life would probably be $20k/yr worse due to search, $5-10k for maps, and $3k/yr worse due to Reader. Maybe $500/yr for News. Google Plus not existing would make my life better (since people who post would post on fb instead, where I'd actually read them).
This is a Randian and ultimately vapid definition of charity. I am all for capitalism but let's not get crazy.
Edit: Capitalism is the opposite of charity because you earn your keep. This is always preferable for both parties IMO.
As does Dictionary.com's: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/charitable
And Wiktionary's: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/charitable
Would me also becoming the richest man on earth as a result matter to you? Would it diminish the value of what I would contribute? And if so, ask yourself why that should matter at all?
This isn't some Rand Objectivist thing. I just don't understand why we use words like charity and philanthropy that tie the outcome/value of something in the world to the self-sacrifice of the outcome's author. It doesn't seem all that relevant to most discussions about the value of a thing.
I think that the statement you quoted is explicitly saying that for-profit software isn't a charitable act. Instead, in an implicit comparison to charitable acts, it's saying that for-profit software can also make life better for users.
This however comes across as feeling sleazy, shrugging it off and doing it anyhow.
e: To expand, CL obviously picked on you specifically, and it deprives all the apartment hunters of your service when applied to the largest apartment listing available. I could see it if they somehow filled the void with a comparable service, before they turned it off, but by depriving padmapper access, it makes it worse for everyone.
Just remember that every nerd that has ever broken any rule --- from seeding a torrent of a movie to scraping a competing site to (yes, go look it up) exploit SQL injection to dump a company's mail spool to the Internet --- has come up with a personally compelling rationale to do it. MAFIAA, "we're helping apartment hunters", "STRATFOR was an evil intelligence company". These are all of a kind.
The fact is, you compete with Craigslist. However much "better" your service is, customers don't agree: they overwhelmingly prefer Craigslist, because that's where the market is: the "killer feature" in your space is the market.
So, to stay viable in the face of competition that has you beaten dead to rights, you've rationalized cheating them.
I don't find what you're doing detestable, or anything like that, but it sure is annoying to watch you pat yourself on the back for it. I'm with Phillip. Have you read a lot of his comments? I have. He's not dumb, nor is he a troll.
There is no reason to believe that PadMapper would not easily end up in the same position going forward, and in fact the incentives are sufficiently poor that it seems like a bad assumption to believe that it would not happen: it, at least, has to be considered. To the extent to which you might argue "the conclusion wouldn't happen with PadMapper", it seems even easier to argue that "the conclusion didn't even happen currently with Craigslist" (again, read my earlier parenthetical).
I bring this up to point out that there is an underlying assumption in your argument that presumes the result: that you already don't like Craigslist, and that that is what causes you to like other people over Craigslist. The DNS argument can be used in either direction: the only pull it has is an appeal to things the listener already might like or dislike (in this case, liking the idea of a theoretical open DNS system, and disliking the idea of hypothetical censorship).
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair)
http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim_buckmaster
Possibly the only CEO ever described as anti-
establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist,
since 2000 Jim has led craigslist to be the most used
classifieds in any medium, and one of world's most popular
websites, while maintaining its public service mission,
non-corporate vibe, and staff of 30-some.
Getting a C+D from Craigslist is a good sign. It means you matter. Hang in there long enough, and Craigslist won't be able to cut you off, because a good chunk of their traffic will come through you.
It's kind of weird to think of Craigslist as stodgy old-media using the courts to defend an out-dated business model because they don't like being disrupted by new technology, but here we are.
If Craiglist was motivated that way, why would they have sent the C+D in the first place? It seems that CL is opposed to anyone violating their TOS, period, regardless of benefit to CL.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of pads on Padmapper are Craigslist posts. But that's just because the overwhelming majority of all advertised apartments are Craigslist posts. If people start using Padmapper in large numbers, it breaks the symmetry of CL's dominance. Landlords are still posting to CL, but renters are finding those posts through Padmapper. It won't be long before landlords realize that those renters will also find posts on Kijiji or Apartments.com or whatever. When that happen's CL is in trouble, because it's revenue comes from landlords in certain cities paying to post.
CL doesn't care about the TOS per se; the TOS are designed to prevent just such a scenario.
And by extension - the relation between CL and many other people who want to disintermediate CL away?
Genuinely curious.
I'm just saying that ericd needn't feel guilty for ignoring Craig's wishes. Do you think Craig feels guilty about destroying the newspaper industry?
Rant/ Just keep going man. If you stop doing what you do you will lose the millions(?) of people you are helping.
Seriously other apartment sites just don't get it. They SUCK ... suck so bad that I'd rather bang my head on the table than use them.
Without PadMapper, craigslist is worse than the other sites. I don't understand why they just don't buy you outright - thats what should happen if anyone cares about the effing consumer.
/Rant
Please keep going and doing what you are doing.
-Very thankful apartment hunter.
In any case, I agree with others that you don't need to bring these kind of justifications to bear. Craigslist has no right (either legally or morally) to facts about rental locations.
I don't have to, but I thought it'd help to explain my reasoning to people.
Consider the following:
I leave a bowl of candy on my doorstep for Halloween with a note that says "Please take one piece of candy.".
You, however, have a bunch of friends back home who aren't at my house to get the candy, so you take the entire bowl. You defend this, citing a "grey area" because your friends want the candy, and you're making them happy because you took it from me and gave it to them.
That's what you did.
No grey area. You just wanted the candy.
(Do I support craigslist's decision? No, I think it's stupid, but it's their stupid decision to make.)
I think you have one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220106