for background (reposted from Quora)
Greg Kidd, 3taps.com Founder, Craiggers.com back... Edit Bio
6 votes by Trevor Bezdek, Eugene Otto, Pat Roberts, (more)
With regards to any 3rd party use of exchange postings in the public domain, be they from Craigslist or any other source that is posting goods and services on the public internet:
1) the fact of an item for sale and the description of that item is not an issue of copyright. The long history of legal theory on this subject is best expounded in the Supreme Court case Feist vs. Rural Telephone. Furthermore, price discovery and transparency of supply and demand require open and equal access to facts in the public domain regarding goods and services for sale. A price quote for a stock or bond or piece of fruit does not "belong" to the originating exchange on which the item is initially offered. The price and identifying information, if put forth in an exchange with public access, is a public good rather than a private entitlement. I, the potential buyer, am free to record that price and those details for comparison or sharing or any other use I so choose to make of with those facts.
2) the facts associated with Craigslist data can be found all over the internet and do not have to be gleaned (scraped) from Craigslist itself. Craigslist is not operating a members only walled garden and has already availed itself to search engines which make their data (along with all other discoverable facts on the internet) available in public domain space. It might be harder to find the data indirectly than directly (as Craigslist doesn’t have an API of its own), but that doesn’t mean that the data isn’t already out there and available to anyone who is willing to put the work in to find and organize those (or any other) postings about goods and services for sale to the general public.
Treat point #1 as an understanding of “what the data is.” Treat point #2 as an understanding of “where the data comes from.” No Terms of Use can trump existing copyright law or first amendment free speech protections. Its true that we live in America where entities write all sorts of predatory contracts with outlandish claims of liquidated damages. But if the claims are, in fact, based on a bogus pretense, then eventually the fallacy will be challenged and over turned. And while a Terms of Use could set conditions for accessing particular private servers by CL, if PadMapper is using alternative public domain sources, what possible access issue could there be?
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