>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data
There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited. As a limited exception, general purpose Internet search engines and noncommercial public archives will be entitled to access craigslist without individual written agreements executed with CL that specifically authorize an exception to this prohibition if, in all cases and individual instances: (a) they provide a direct hyperlink to the relevant craigslist website, service, forum or content; (b) they access craigslist from a stable IP address using an easily identifiable agent; and (c) they comply with CL's robots.txt file; provided however, that CL may terminate this limited exception as to any search engine or public archive (or any person or entity relying on this provision to access craigslist without their own written agreement executed with CL), at any time and in its sole discretion, upon written notice, including, without limitation, by email notice.
When a group can interfere with how you hunt for a place to live something is up. Where you live is pretty fundamental.
What entitled bullshit. People/companies do that all the time. Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
Wanting the market to work isn't entitled BS. It's good civic thinking. Craigslist holding onto its incumbency, counter to the interests of the public is entitled BS.
> Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
The first would've been the market working as it should. Also, if Padmapper messes up its UI and goes out of business, then the market works as it should.
Craigslist holding onto its monopoly position is a broken market.
This sounds more like whining than anything based in reality. Craigslist has a monopoly on apartment rent listings?
http://www.apartmentguide.com/
http://www.apartmentfinder.com/
http://www.apartmentsearch.com/
Pedant posturing aside, to those who have "skin in the game," namely those renting and renting-out property and paying real money for leases, Craigslist is the 800 lb gorilla in most markets.
False. From the EFF: https://www.eff.org/wp/clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-t...
> Given the emphasis placed on a user’s assent, courts favor finding a binding agreement where the user engages in affirmative conduct acknowledging the terms of a TOS. For instance, a genuine clickwrap agreement, in which a service provider places a TOS just adjacent to or below a click-button (or check-box), has been held to be sufficient to indicate the user agreed to the listed terms. In these cases, requiring the user to click “I Agree,” after calling attention to the terms and affording the user an opportunity to review them, demonstrates the user agreed to the terms. However, courts generally do not require that you actually have read the terms, but just that you had reasonable notice and an opportunity to read them.
In other courts on the other hand in cases about copyright violations even if accuser provided IP address, logs clearly indicating defendants computer the case was dismissed because he still failed to indicate that it was in fact the defendant that downloaded and/or served the copyrighted file in question.
I'd say same way there's no possibility anyone could prove that it was I who checked the checkbox.
But please ignore me. I'm just venting.
But like padmapper, you would be completely screwed if it turned into a lawsuit.
Furthermore, the publicly-accessible data isn't being copied, it's being consumed. I may consume the data to find an apartment. Someone might consume the data to calculate the average market prices in a city. Padmapper consumes the data to generate locations on a map.
From what you've written above it sounds like you believe any contract between two parties is absurd in the extreme.
Well, if nothing else, the submitting users' copyright applies. CL has a license to use it however they like, you don't.
Since CL offers their data freely to "the public", by what theory can they prevent the public from using their own chosen client browser to view it? Why should there be a distinction between software installed in my computer and a cloud-hosted application like Padmapper?
I believe that Padmapper, as an agent acting on behalf of its users, has every right to reformat the information originating on CL as long as it does not purposefully seek to cause confusion about the origin of the data (which they do not as they link to the source).
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a compilation work such as a database must contain a minimum level of creativity in order to be protectable under the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court (...) held that Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright protection, since the white pages did not meet the statutory requirement for originality under 17 U.S.C. §102(a).
Cragslist is completely automated. There's absolutely no creativity involved.
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
Unfortunately for them, "sweat of the brow" doesn't afford copyright protection in the US.
In any case, Craigslist is completely unoriginal in its selection and arrangement of the data; the selection is "whatever people submit" and the arrangement is LIFO. I find it very hard to believe they'll be awarded copyright over it.
Whoa whoa whoa, the coding of the site didn't involve a species of creativity?
If you mean that the content of a posting didn't involve creativity on Craigslist's part, you'd be on firmer ground, but even there they made design decisions (however questionable...) about how to present it.
The design decision are irrelevant, since Padmapper isn't copying those.
So would I—phone books are not subject to compilation copyright, because there's no editorial choice going on. That was settled in the _Feist_ case.
When I upload a video to YouTube, I do expect to retain control of it solely through my interactions with YouTube, and expect that when I take it down it gets taken down across all Google properties. I would be pretty angry if I found that my videos were on another site which had scraped YouTube's data and now was hosting my video without any ability for me to remove it.
It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
Edit: finished my thought that I left out mid-sentence.
As I have said elsewhere, I think Craigslist are within their rights here, but the situation still sucks. People want to browse apartment listings on a map, and Craigslist won't let us.
Does it suck for people on the other end - people with a property that they'd like to rent to others?
Why hasn't some other solution come onto the market to fix the problems of craigslist?
Are you asking why nobody has made a website that competes directly with Craiglist, but with a better interface? Padmapper allows you to post listing directly, but it's very difficult to get buyers or sellers to bother with a different marketplace when all the other buyers and sellers are already using Craigslist. You can't beat Craigslist on price, and many non-technical people are already comfortable with the existing system. Convincing them to switch to a different marketplace with fewer potential customers and a new interface is very difficult, no matter how great your features are.
Due to various factors (demographics, etc.), sellers also tend to be not the most tech savvy people. I can't believe that it is not standard procedure to post a video walk-through these days. A lot of listings lack even a photo.
Monopoly power.
Is it Craigslist's data? Does Craigslist own the posts that caused women to be murdered and stolen property to be sold? If they own that data, then they must be culpable (to some degree) for these bad acts.
If they own it, they are now more than just a service provider (IMO) and can no longer be protected by the DCA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
For example, they do not own the fact that you are selling a toothbrush. The do own the records on their servers which catalog the fact that you are selling a toothbrush.
Why? Because they are the ones who went to the trouble of gathering and storing those records.
This is somewhat akin to recording a verbal note from a customer in a book, and storing that book in a giant library. Sure, the user owns the information, but that doesn't mean you are obligated to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry come in and use your library how they see fit- it's your library, even though you do not hold the copyright to all the information stored there.
/pedant
Im sure that's why their try this lowball trick to defend themselves and show it to judge "hey we want to innovate, and Craiglist does not want to".
But sure its not their business what CL does...
Well, for one thing: different ideas about what constitutes fair game for property/control claims.
Not everything can be copyrighted or patented, and specifically, it's really not clear that a rental/for sale/wanted listing is actually a copyrightable work.
If that weren't enough, though, there's also not really a clear difference between what Padmapper does and a search engine -- it doesn't "steal" listings and put them wholesale on their site without attribution, it provides a geographic search that yields a limited digest and then points users to the original source.
Note that these are free links, not paid-for API calls.
Who's free-riding whom?
It would be different if Craiglist embedded the maps from GM or MQ, but in such case CL would probably do so with permission from those companies (possibly even--gasp--paying for the right to embed maps).
I also noted that API usage would have been paid (or at least licensed), so in that sense, CL are (legitimately) freeloading on Google and Yahoo. While the argument could be made that CL are sending traffic to these sites, that same argument would apply to Padmapper.
The facts themselves aren't subject to copyright.
Access through the CL site is governed by various computer use statutes. Though aggregation-via-proxy as PM are doing through Google cache raises some interesting issues.