Hacker News Reader

Comment by kloncks | Hacker News Reader

No.

It's not their data. It's ours, as the users. Craigslist doesn't own anything I upload to them.

The reason PadMapper exists is because Craigslist refuses to not suck.

"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."

http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use

Hadn't actually dug into the ToS, but the bit:

> You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution...

Seems to be vital to this case.

Rightshaven (copyright troll) was granted the same right by the copyright holders they represent, yet the judge ruled they didn't have standing to sue on the copyright holder's behalf.

The Righthaven case is slightly different, though I hope the logic still applies. (I'm not a lawyer, but I read the Righthaven opinion[1] when the Padmapper/3Taps workaround was originally discussed.) The difference is that Righthaven was granted merely the right to sue on behalf of the original copyright holder, but none of the exclusive rights that copyrights actually bestow upon their owners. It could be interpreted that posters grant Craigslist some of their exclusive rights ("copy, perform, display," etc.), and suing to protect those rights may be legally kosher. I know of no such precedent.

My personal interpretation/hope is that the right to sue for copyright infringement is nontransferable, which would give Craigslist no standing to sue. Individual posters could sue, however.

[1] https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/righthaven_v_dem/order6-1... (See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righthaven_LLC_v._Democratic_Un...)

CL revised their TOU recently (within the past year, possibly more recently than that). It wasn't a minor edit, it was a complete rewrite.

I suspect this may have been one of the introduced terms.

Yes, the key point would be unauthorized, CL is going to have to prove that the PadMapper's usage was unauthorized (by the owner of the data)

That's a given. The only way they'd have authorization by the owners of the data would be to e-mail the poster of every CL listing and ask for it. We know they don't do that. The key point is whether there's copyright infringement at all, not whether it was authorized.

Then Craigslist should ban Google from indexing their pages

And you automatically grant Craigslist your first born child and all future earnings and your left index finger. Laywers love to fill these things with unenforceable outlandish crap. The courts are more discerning.

Err, that's actually a very reasonable Terms of Service.

It says that you own everything you post, but you are granting them the rights to use it. The only unusual bit is that you are additionally granting them the right to go after people who scrape your content on your behalf.

That's not that unusual for sites that contain user-generated content. If someone's hosting a blog full of scraped YouTube videos, YouTube can go after them without contacting the owner of each individual video.

The grant is not exclusive and the authority to decide what is an is not authorized is not claimed by CL. If it is unauthorized they claim rights and causes. You can't have a non-exclusive grant without this distinction.

The ToS may not mention exclusivity, but the source of data (for Padmapper) is Craigslist. Thus, the clause of "unauthorized copying" applies.

Exactly right. And if you want your data to be reposted on another site, then you should repost it.

Craigslist is delivering exactly what it its users signed up for (no more no less). People posting ads on Craigslist do not necessarily want or intend for it to be reposted on other sites.

"People posting ads on Craigslist do not necessarily want or intend for it to be reposted on other sites."

That argument appears to be invalidated by Craiglist's own terms of use, which say that when you upload a listing to Craigslist they can syndicate it wherever they want (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287519).

Well, that's a fair point, but I don't think that right matters much unless and until they exercise it. A better argument (against myself) is that they're apparently willing to sell some type of access to your posts for use on mobile apps.

Still, I think there's something admirable in the simplicity and transparency of interacting with Craigslist. What you see is pretty much exactly what you get.

The key point is that the TOS says that you grant Craigslist the right to redistribute your listing where ever they see fit, it doesn't say some third party entity has the right to do that.

As far as I'm aware, if you post information in a place where it will be publicly accessible, then you are tacitly agreeing that third parties will be able to access it and use it as they please. That's not a right that needs to be given to these third parties. It exists from the get-go, and must be explicitly taken away by something like copyright.

So I can legally start amazon-copied-reviews.com and scrape every product review from amazon.com with my own referrer links to Walmart without fear of repercussion? Sweet.

Yes it does: "fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers)"

Licensing implies getting CL's authorisation

And CL refusing in this case is in the user's benefit, how?

> And if you want your data to be reposted on another site, then you should repost it.

I had to giggle a little bit at this in the grand scheme of the internet, sorry.

When I posted something on Facebook Marketplace, I started getting emails and comments from other "market" sites that Facebook had cross-posted my listing to.

While it was annoying to not know this up front, the fact that it was more visible and getting more bites because of it only helped me make the sale quicker. If a service wants to piggyback off of another to make my postings more buoyant, as a user and seller, I don't have a problem with it.

Personally, I'd prefer if Facebook acted a little more like Craigslist with my data, not the other way around.

Interestingly, in both cases, the economic incentives for operators seem to be basically counter to likely user intent and expectations.

In response to your "only helped": on one of the other Padmapper stories here on HN, someone wrote that after their item sold and they cancelled the Craigslist ad, they continued to get contacted about the item because third parties had scraped the ad and did not stop displaying their copy when the ad disappeared from Craigslist.

This happened to me on the Facebook ad too, but I preferred it it over the lack of any response at all - it proved the services were used. Easy to ignore them or send a generic reply.

Padmapper's isn't "reposting" any given listing -- it displays an abbreviated digest of the listing in its search results, and then if the user clicks, it takes them to the original listing.

If this is illegal or otherwise objectionable without an explicit agreement from each Craigslist poster, I'm not really sure how a search engine or even descriptive hyperlinking is kosher without explicit agreement from each website indexed or referred to.

Uh oh... Bye bye Google and all search engines.

Google obeys robots.txt file. Padmapper does not. That's a critical difference.

CL's robot.txt file does not 'disallow' crawling the real estate section. So Padmapper was likely as compliant as Google.

http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt

No, this is just semantics.

The point is Google respects publishers' desire not to be indexed. Padmapper does not. Robots.txt is simply a common method for conveying that message. It's not like Padmapper could argue they didn't know CL was unhappy; they got a certified letter!

This is just semantics. Google respects publishers who do not want their sites listed.

Good luck explaining that to a judge. Would you gamble a company based on that distinction?

True, but that's irrelevant to the comment I was replying to. We are talking about user expectations with regard to content they posted being made available on other sites.

And as a user you can put your information up on PadMapper if you like. If you don't, then it isn't up to PadMapper to get it for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com