Craigslist (and Silicon Valley) Greatly Offends The NY Times

This article has no real defense or data points of CL, just bunch of words trying to provoke emotions. Title is also designed to be link bait by equating critic of CL with entire Silicon Valley.

I wonder if the author of the post understands the problem here or has some other hidden agenda. It is very clear that CL had no reason to send lawyers if a guy was not even scrapping their website. The fact is CL has effectively become monopoly by levering network effect. This network effect had been created by gaining trust of users and its "public good" philosophy. In my view, CL's actions have betrayed those users. Now they are more concerned with saving their business and stopping others to become more popular. Because of lack of resources they can't invest in new innovations but they also don't want others to do it either. They have created a fence around data which is not even owned by them.

A company that preaches "public good" and then goes out to hires top tier lawyers for "copyright violations" isn't doing "unqualified good thing".

If the people who put their data into CL wanted their data in the other apps, they'd put it there.

If you photocopied my rolodex, and started calling all of my contacts, I'd come after you too.