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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data. The posts belong to the users who submitted them; they just grant a license to Craigslist. 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.

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.

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Hmm, I posted a job ad last week and saw this at the bottom of the submission form:

"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.

This is just deliberately overstated language written by lawyers, to give CL maximum legal power if they ever need it. In practice they let search engines index them, and users know and expect that.

>and users know and expect that.

[citation needed]

You said that the user data is "not Craigslist's data", but the license agreement shows that it is Craigslist's data. They have an exclusive license and power to enforce it.

If the license agreement isn't enough, then I guess I don't know what you mean by "not Craigslist's data".

Craigslist can claim whatever they want but that does not make it true. When you post an apartment for rent that is factual information that an apartment at a particular location is available for a specific price. Much like the case of a movie theater offering tickets to a showing at a specific place and time.

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.

One, the presentation of factual information can be intellectual property; two, the presentation of someone else's factual information can be intellectual property.

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.

I'm not sure if you've used PadMapper, but it's showing things about the listings, not the listings themselves. To see those, you have to click through to the listing.

I bet you most YC startups offer an API, negating the need for scraping =)

Yes the creative presentation of factual information can be protected intellectual property. Craigslist however only collects information it is given and displays them as such. Craigslist does not add any creativity or originality to the posts.

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.

That's really irrelevant, though, isn't it?

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.

> That's really irrelevant, though, isn't it?

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.

I think exclusive was added recently, but I can't be sure. Anyone else remember it?

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.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110725202211/http://www.craigsl... contains the bit about copyright enforcements rights in section 14. That dates back to at least 2009. In February they reorganized it a bit (so now it's section 3a)

Wow, with the "exclusive"s, that is extremely anticompetitive language; they are forbidding you from posting the same job ad (your own ad that you wrote!) on both Craigslist and a competing site. I hope it's not enforceable, but I'm still stunned they would try that. I'm curious, did you actually follow that rule and refrain from posting your ad anywhere else?

Yes, but to be honest Craigslist is getting the exclusive right to the specific posting. It doesn't stop me from making a new job ad somewhere else. I believe the crux of the issue is at the mark of creating the ad versus copying the CL ad and hosting the content somewhere else.

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

I think where you and I differ is that I don't believe that people who use Craigslist are under the impression that their data will be indexed/used elsewhere; I know I've never assumed that, and I'm willing to bet the same goes for the every day person. If I post something on CL, then I expect others to find my ad through CL. There's almost this unwritten social contract that users expect services they use to participate in when they submit their data.

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.

If it makes you feel better, PadMapper is attempting to act in a way consistent with search engines - give a bit of a preview of a listing and then link back to the original. It's not taking the text and reposting it or anything like that.

I think this is a bit disingenious. Google indexes the entire web, not just a specific subset of it that it can hopefully in the future turn a profit by supplanting Craigslist (ie links and leads to Padlister). This is why you see CL allowing Google to index their website. If CL thought Google was going to spin up apartments.google.com relying off the back of CLs data you could probably expect a lawsuit there also. It's all about context and to suggest otherwise is just trying to find a way to profit off the back of another company who has already done the legwork.

I'm not sure I buy this argument. What if Padmapper folks were to create a site, lets call it PadBay and start scraping eBay lists and then provide a nicer UI, auction format and so and so forth, technically the same argument would apply, but eBay would rightly go after PadBay and would be correct.

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.

This happened about 10 years ago when eBay sued Bidder's Edge over its scraping of eBay's listings to gather statistics [1]. eBay sued, and although the case was never fully developed, the preliminary injunction issued against Bidder's Edge killed off an entire cottage industry of auction tools and analytics services, including the company I worked for at the time. I believe it also helped solidify eBay's dominance in the online auction market as the disappearance of these services made it much more difficult for buyers and sellers use multiple auction providers (anyone remember Yahoo! Auctions?) in an easy way.

[1] https://www.law.upenn.edu/fac/pwagner/law619/f2001/week11/bi...

But isn't that the downside of working in someone else's ecosystem? That company is going to do what's best for that company, as they should, and unless you have a contract with them, they are free to change how they allow access to the data they collected. Padmapper knew they were in a grey area, they rolled the dice and came out ahead more often than not. But at the end of the day, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

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.

PadMapper currently uses 3Taps to access Craigslist data, which piggybacks on search engine results. Craigslist can't prevent this but by a) setting the whole site to Disallow in robots.txt, removing the whole site from search results on Google & other search engines, or b) legal force.

There's a difference between what is legal, and what is technically capable. It is illegal for me to go into someone's house without an invitation, but I'm technically capable of breaking a window and letting myself in. Now, a lot of people will make the argument that this is very different than breaking a window, because there is no physical damages. But all damages don't to be out of destroyed property. What Padmapper is doing, is effectively trying to sell hamburgers inside of a McDonald's: They are leveraging someone else's hardwork in developing a user base and repeat customers, to further their own goals.

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.

> hardwork in developing a user base and repeat customers

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.

The work they do behind the scenes to keep the site running is massively under-rated because few people run such sites.

The work they did behind the scenes was impressive in the 1990s. Today it's only impressive because Craigslist is built with antique technology.

Scaling mostly-static content with zero page customization is not rocket science anymore. Just ask anyone in the porn biz.

Scaling is not the issue. Keeping it relatively clean is the issue. Dealing with criminals and law enforcement. Keeping the community satisfied. Classifieds ads sites are a magnet for spam and all sorts of nastiness, and Craigslist is the biggest one.

By this evaluation, they have utterly failed. Craigslist is full of spam and criminals and users who are bitterly unhappy with the lousy UX.

> "What Padmapper is doing, is effectively trying to sell hamburgers inside of a McDonald's: They are leveraging someone else's hardwork in developing a user base and repeat customers, to further their own goals."

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?

One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data.

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?

> they just grant a license to Craigslist.

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.

Can I start scraping data from Hipmunk? It's not their data...

One difference that is very important to me, Hipmunk (and most other companies) are actively working very hard to improve the user experience and overall usefulness of theirs sites. Craigslist is doing the opposite. They are expending energy to make things worse for their users and customers, by shutting down third party sites. If you were to ask the people listing the properties, they would want their properties to be accessible via PadMapper. One motivation for CL to shut down third party sites is to minimize the efficiency of a listing being fulfilled and removed. If an apartment is found immediately and rented on PM, that is less revenue for CL.

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.

Thanks for weighing in, PG!

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