Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com