When Craigslist Blocks Innovations
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
I get that you may need to bend rules to innovate and that they were pulling CL's data in a way that did not affect their bandwidth, but at the end of the day, it's Craigslist that has attracted the users, Craigslist that has engaged the user, and it's Craigslist that has acquired and recorded that data.
The fact that Padmapper's UI is better is totally irrelevant and is just a way to distract from the real issue – blatant disregard of CL's wishes to hold on to its data.
EDIT: Replies have made some good points, so this isn't so black-and-white to me anymore.
Back when PadMapper was scraping the data itself, sure, there was a whole TOS / cost argument to be made. At that point I did think Craigslist was in the right. But that appears to have been gotten around completely legally, and Craigslist has moved into the position of being the bully in this argument.
Most users use Craignlist under the assumption it being a "public good" site. If someone is not draining the bandwidth, the public data in Craiglist should be perfectly sharable.
It's very clear that Craiglist had been betraying their user's trust for them being "public good" company. The public good companies don't hire top notch lawyers to go after copyright violations.
So what? Lets assume it is your/mine/somebody's data. When we post stuff to Craiglist we give Craigslist a license to use it. We --by the ToS explicitly DON'T and even ignoring the ToS still-- implicitly DON'T give Padmapper a license to use our data. Padmapper was still using data it had no license to use, regardless of who that license should come from.
I write a post that says "I am renting an apartment at 221B Baker Street."
Padmapper copies it.
My post is not copyrightable, so (regardless of what you think of the copyrightability of a collection of facts), Padmapper has not violated the copyright on my single post because it doesn't exist.
If I were to include some original creative text that was copyrightable, Padmapper is still fine, because they only copy the facts of the post not the full text.
1) Craigslist may own text in the ads, but they don't own facts. (Likewise, it's OK for me to tell Alice that Bob posted a poem on his window about cats so that she can go read it, even though it would not be kosher for me to make her a copy, and even if Bob asked me not to tell her.) Padmapper don't use the full ad text, just the fact that the ad exists and discusses housing at a particular location.
2) Many (most?) would argue that, unlike physical property rights, intellectual property rights are only justified insofar as they are a net good for society. I have a Lockean right to the shirt on my back regardless of whether or not there are laws to protect me, but my ability to get 20-year patents (and not 1-year patents or 100-year patents) persists at the pleasure of the legislature. Likewise can be said for copyrights. So even if Craigslist is in the right under the current law, that doesn't mean this situation couldn't be catalyst for good change, and that discussion of crappy UI is important (i.e. not a red herring).
3) Craigslist has monopolistic powers in this market; in the presence of competition, their crappy UI might be forced out of business. One can justify open data requirements as an alternative way of reducing monopolistic powers to standard trust busting methods.
Not saying you're wrong, but I can't see why you'd want to put up a top-level comment with broad claims that doesn't address these and other issues raised in previous HN discussions.
The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL. Now it's clear either that they've changed their position, or that the bandwidth argument was just an excuse for shutting down sites they felt might one day compete with them.
"Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent. "
I'm not sure whether your assumption or information was taken first hand from from Craigslist guys, but it doesn't look like that's the current implementation.
[citation needed]
If the license agreement isn't enough, then I guess I don't know what you mean by "not Craigslist's data".
Padmapper (which I just used just before this whole situation and found an awesome place) doesnt take your 'creative' post. They merely take the factual title and existence of a listing and direct you to it.
The Craigslist-hate is very strange considering much of this community was seeded by people providing web interfaces to information. I bet there are a number of YC companies that would send out the lawyers if they found their sites being illegally scraped and repackaged.
The is no "Craigslist-hate" but I do disagree on their claimed ownership of facts. I think Feist v. Rural (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US...) covered this pretty well.
CL could allow search engines to index but could explicitly disallow third parties (fourth parties?) from using the content, regardless of how that additional party retrieved that content.
To me, it sounds a lot like the MLB statements before every ballgame and I question whether they have any actual legal force.
If CL had any sense, they'd try to buy PadMapper to improve their service.
Additionally you can't copyright facts.
From Feist v. Rural a collection of facts can only be copyrighted insomuch as they are creatively selected and arranged. Feist specifically states it doesn't matter how hard it was for them to collect the facts.
The selection isn't creative, because there is not selection, And the arrangement is only by geographic location and time--the only viable way to post such material, so not original or creative.
In addition Padmapper doesn't take the writing directly they just take out the relavent facts.
Again facts aren't copyrightable if you aren't copying a creative selection or arraignment.
I see this as no different than a T.V. guide publishing short blurbs about the episodes and order of a TV show.
By creating the CL ad, I honor the fact that I don't go to site X and choose to 'import' my ad from CL. I just create a new one somewhere else, which delineates both of them as separate ads. Just my 2 cents
But the more I think about it, I do see that it's not as clear-cut as I previously thought. There are tons of sites that store and display our tweets without our explicit consent, and we, at least I, seem to be ok with that.
As far as it being the users data, this is true. But the collecting, organizing, publishing and accessibility of that data is a service that Craigslist provides, to the user, in exchange for an unlimited license of that material. I would love it if Craigslist opened up their data, but it just doesn't make any sense for them as a business.
This isn't anti-competitive. This is Craigslist saying, "go across the street and build your company on your own merits, not our captive audience". If Padmapper is that great, and I believe they are, then they will have no problem building up their own user base. They just happened to lose their shortcut.
The ratio of revenue/visits/whatever metric craigslist has made in the last decade relative to their work is astronomical. They initially may have done hard work, but for most of their existence they have been reaping the continued benefits of winning a lottery 15 years ago. They have engaged in near zero innovation since securing a near-monopoly on online classifieds.
> If Padmapper is that great, and I believe they are, then they will have no problem building up their own user base.
Not necessary true. Craigslist is in a two-sided market, which favors the emergence of a monopoly. Padmapper currently makes the process of finding an apartment easier. The sister site Padlister is working on making offering easier, but the benefits are very small compared to what Padmapper offers renters.
Eventually, Padmapper could displace craigslist, but its going to be a very long process. In the meantime apartment hunters suffer by having to utilize a significantly less efficient UI.
Scaling mostly-static content with zero page customization is not rocket science anymore. Just ask anyone in the porn biz.
The analogy fails in two respects: 1) Padmapper doesn't make money off of Craigslist listings. 2) Padmapper shows facts about the listing, not the CL listing itself, and it links back to the original listing. If that's considered 'selling burgers inside of McD', then Google is also 'selling burgers inside of McD'.
The difference between the two situations are that in one case, there's only one place content is posted (padmapper/CL case). In the other case, content is posted to a lot of different places (google/web).
If history were different, and most content were hosted on AOL/Geocities, and Google was doing the same thing it's doing now, would you make the same argument for AOL/Geocities that you would for CL?
I'm curious about this point. The article says that Craigslist disrupted the newspaper classified section. Does this mean that one could type out the classified sections from newspapers without any worries? I'm curious that no-one I'm aware of during the dot-com boom and bust did just that.
The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL.
Taking it at face value, what's so bad about changing one's position? Don't we all have the right to change our minds, especially if we think our initial position to be incorrect?
The data that a user has posted to CL is indeed CL's data since CL is storing it. CL is not claiming copyright on the item, rather the post to CL. The user is indeed allowed to repost it elsewhere and that would be that site's data.
[1] https://www.law.upenn.edu/fac/pwagner/law619/f2001/week11/bi...
CL are entirely within their legal rights, but they are in a position of great power, they are doing absolutely nothing to improve life for either side of the transactions they broker, and they are making the world a worse place.
Under specific terms. And if you are smart enough to make this argument, than you can't just ignore those terms.
> And the users clearly don't want or expect this license to be an exclusive one, because the posts are indexed by all the major search engines.
"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)."
> Now it's clear either that they've changed their position,
Steve Jobs, arguably one of the greatest CEO's of our time, constantly changed his mind.
Part 1: Craigslist has a natural monopoly. Let's assume (as I believe) that in my city 90% of by-owner apartment listings happen to be posted only to Craigslist at the moment. Since apartment hunters have limited time, most of them (like me) search only on Craigslist. Since landlords have limited time and most apartment hunters only search on Craigslist, most landlords only consider posting on Craigslist. Which means the cycle continues, and next month 90% of by-owner apartment listings will still be posted only on Craigslist.
Part 2: the natural monopoly makes Craigslist prohibitively difficult to disrupt. The sole valuable commodity in the marketplace is information about which apartments are available. Craigslist obtains this commodity for free. Craigslist gives away this commodity to consumers for free. Craigslist refuses to share this commodity with anyone else. So disruption is highly unlikely: you would have to generate a commodity (information about apartment listings) at great expense that your competitor gets for free, and then you'd have to make money on it when your competitor gives it away for free.
Part 3: Craigslist is taking advantage of its protected position by offering an inferior product. It is the only real estate site on the internet that fails to take advantage of a certain infographic tool developed several millennia ago to represent the most important fact about real estate in a way that humans can easily understand. Which is to say, it doesn't have freakin' maps. This has wasted, literally, many hours of my personal time (longer than it took to write this comment, for example), and the time of hundreds of thousands of other people like me, and it is not a choice that a company facing any kind of competitive threat would make.
Part 4: Craigslist's protected position depends on our recognition of its ownership of public information. Landlords are using Craigslist to announce to the world that a certain property exists at a certain location for a certain price. The basic state of a real estate market is that there are a bunch of people trying to advertise their goods, and they'll use the most efficient way to do it. If we as a society decide that, because Craigslist is the most efficient way, it therefore has exclusive ownership of the information it is broadcasting, then Craigslist can continue to use its protected position to offer an inferior product without competition and waste hours of my time. If we decide that Craigslist does not own the basic facts it is broadcasting, then the information becomes a public resource, and services will have to compete to make it conveniently available, causing the market to work better.
Given the above four points, I conclude that the information landlords broadcast through Craigslist should not be Craigslist's property, because propertizing that information causes harm to our society that isn't outweighed by the benefits. So I support Padmapper's choice to test Craigslist's legal right to control that information, and I hope it turns out that Craigslist can't.
The world always turns out to be more complicated than I want, of course, and maybe there are terrible things that would happen in other situations or industries -- or even in the online real estate market -- if Craigslist didn't have the legal rights it claims it has. I'm open to hearing that argument. But if you're trying to understand why so many are defending Padmapper, I hope this helps.
This is in my opinion, one of the few roles that government should play in the economy. Instead, they ignore important things like this where they could make a positive societal difference and instead interfere most everywhere else, often causing harm.
When Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension from exporting friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084), nobody defended Facebook.
Nobody defended the medical supply industry in an article about how they're blocking startups from selling to hospitals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305).
I don't recall ever seeing a comment defending ISPs that attempt to block users from downloading illegal content -- even when those ISPs are themselves part of a media company.
Hell, just a little less than three years ago, when Craigslist blocked a Yahoo service for pulling data from CL and customizing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934), the opinions on HN were quite a bit different than they are now. (Amusingly, you left a comment in that thread too -- except that you didn't seem to be defending Craigslist nearly as much as you are now.)
If there were no such thing as a good online directory, and somebody built a startup out of digitizing phone books and making them searchable, and the phone companies then filed lawsuits against that startup, would people come out of the woodwork defending the phone companies? I find that difficult to believe.
If regional banks started blocking access from Mint.com, would there be grounds for defending them?
For me, it simply comes down to what I think of as "hacker morality": this tool sucks, and I can build a better one, so I will. I hate searching for stuff on Craigslist -- in fact, I never use it anymore because of the completely miserable experience that Craigslist is when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If I really wanted to get something from Craigslist, I'd probably write a crawler and indexer of my own -- I already have those tools -- and then stick a filter on to send me an email when it finds whatever I'm looking for.
Padmapper is saving me, and a lot of other people without those tools, all of that trouble. Good for them.
I can only think of one reason not to make this a browser extension, and that would be to give a middleman the opportunity to completely subsume CL's role. This sounds like it could be a good beginner project for me.
We in the software industry should appreciate the damage that can be done by evil monopolies.
If you've ever met Eric (Padmapper is a one-man shop), you'll quickly get the sense that he isn't a slick-talkin' kind of guy. I can tell you that it is journalists that approached Eric, not the other way around.
Writing something and calling it a TOS does not automatically make "violating" it illegal. Say, you can make yourself a t-shirt saying "Photographing me is prohibited", yet people still have a right to take pictures of you in public places. Regardless of what your t-shirt says. In offline world people have a legal right to use your data (your own likeness in this example) even if you object, and there are very good reasons why they have this right. I don't see why it should be any different online.
PM is not abusing CL. PM is publishing facts about what is being posted to CL. This should qualify as protected speech and fair use. If the current law does not say so it is wrong and should be fixed.
Because if they aren't, their data isn't copyrightable.
They don't select anything--there is no one at Craigslist performing a creative act of selection.
Their arrangement of apartment listings isn't creative or original. It's based solely on geography, and time. I also don't think Padmapper is actually copying the arrangement.
Furthermore even if there were actually copyrightable text within the individual ads, Padmapper doesn't copy the text, just the facts.
You should read the Feist v. Rural decision if you want more information on copyrighting collections of facts.
And sloppy journalism. Why won't anyone ask PadMapper why they decided against? This is like half of a linkbait article. The fact that CL offered paid access was in last week's HN stories. I bet there's a breathless follow-up article with that fact, trolling for additional page views.
In what way is it "their data" if they release it to the public? The law is pretty clear about this--facts can't be copyrighted. They don't own the facts. They don't own the bits that padmapper is referencing. All they own is the db records for the posts that originated the information.
Imagine if they had a CL user meetup in public somewhere, and then they charged users to use a megaphone to announce that they were selling something. Someone writes down the information and has their own meetup for people who couldn't make it to the free, public CL meetup. Whats the difference between that and what padmapper is doing, except that padmapper is getting the information second hand?
If CL thinks they have a right to their data, they should be suing google should they?
I don't get where you came up with that. It wasn't in the article at all.
While it is true that "facts can't be copyrighted", it's unclear that Craigslist listings qualify as facts in the relevant sense. (The singles listings, for example, surely don't.)
> Someone writes down the information and has their own meetup for people who couldn't make it to the free, public CL meetup. Whats the difference between that and what padmapper is doing, except that padmapper is getting the information second hand?
Getting the information second-hand seems fairly significant.
Don't get me wrong - I think that craigslist should be disrupted, but I don't think that you should just do the easy parts.
Note that the NYT has a dog in this fight - Craigslist has "disrupted" the newspaper biz.
I meant to suggest that that made it even less significant. The information is already widely disseminated across multiple platforms because its public information. Sure, everyone knows that CL is the original source for the information, but that doesn't meant that only people they say can have the information should have the information. Its public, broadcasted information.
Sure, they can put something on their website along the lines of "You're not allowed to distribute this information", but why does that have any weight if they don't own the information?
Padmapper only publishes the relavant facts from the listing. Even if the whole text contains copyrightable material (some prose describing the house maybe), they don't copy the whole text just the facts.
This apartment is available for rent here, it has 4 bedrooms etc...
They are the IE6 of classified ads. And just like IE6 they are holding back innovation.
Obviously it's something people want, so why wouldn't they integrate it? I don't get the business goal here.
I strongly suspect both sites are pretty equal in their overstated desire to "just do good".
I am not saying such apps are useless; I'm building one now for a marketplace with pretty shitty UI.
But it's not an innovation.
The story would not have been as sympathetic to Mr. DeMenthon if he was hosting a site called, WhereToSetUpMethLabs.com.
After all, they have done nothing to stop Pad Mapper from doing their thing, given Pad Mapper goes and uses their own data.
The whole thing stinks and Craigslist is completely right in putting a stop to data leeching. There isn't enough CSS3 candy that you can slap on top stolen data to wash it clean. It's a red herring argument that distracts from the main issue that they don't obey they rules of the site that feeds them.
But what 3Taps, the other lawsuit target, is doing seems far less defensible. They use the trademarked name "Craigslist" prominently and repeatedly on their site to promote their service. See http://3taps.com (screenshot at http://oi48.tinypic.com/1zx2qkk.jpg in case the design changes).
Worse, the website Craiggers.com that's described in the lawsuit (and indeed registered to 3Taps) not only uses the trademark, but reproduces posts wholesale with the entire content and photographs. (Example: http://oi50.tinypic.com/5l9cvb.jpg) At the bottom of each post it has a "public domain" mark and says "This work ([name] by [poster email]), identified by craigslist, is free of known copyright restrictions." This is clearly untrue: the photographs are creative and original works copyrighted to the poster (and licensed to Craigslist), as are the prose descriptions whenever they carry more than a bare minimum of information.
I can't imagine what 3Taps is thinking. In contrast to the relatively cautious approach of PadMapper, they're being extremely brazen in copying everything from Craigslist and using its name to promote themselves. And if they get smacked down, PadMapper's lost its data source.
So... how about if Padmapper were to change its approach, and start acting like a value-added front end to Craigslist? Landlords and realtors could post their ads on Padmapper instead of going directly to Craigslist. Padmapper would then do two things: first, it would immediately forward a copy of each ad to Craigslist on the user's behalf, as if it had been posted there originally, and second, it would host the same ad itself, with all of the accompanying maps and metadata that Craigslist refuses to support.
If a given ad was originally submitted to Padmapper, their right to show it would be absolutely indisputable. If Padmapper is indeed more user-friendly than Craigslist, then more and more users will come to rely on them, and ignore Craigslist altogether. At the same time, users who prefer to stick with Craigslist wouldn't see any disruption at all.