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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Under the disguise of a pseudo-charity, Craigslist just revealed it's true intentions. They foolishly just opened themselves up to a lot of hate and possibly gave people a huge reason to try out competitors. This may be the beginning of the end of Craigslist's Empire. This is usually how it starts, users being held hostage, increased control, and decreased satisfaction with the service with no way out due to network effects.

We all believed in Craigslist and this is our reward? WE built up Craigslist to be what it is and now we're held hostage for it? I feel like a fool, why do we keep falling for this? Help the little grow until he becomes king and screws us all.

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They're changing it to have legal grounds to fend off sites like Padmapper. If they have the exclusive license and another site copies the add and gussies up the display, they have legal grounds to go after the infringing site now. Prior to the explicit issuance of an exclusive license, lawyers for alternative services could make a compelling argument that Craigslist did not assert any license to the content and therefore couldn't legally prevent them from offering a service on top of Craigslist. Adding the copyright license closes that loophole. Now, whether or not an exclusive copyright license is the best way to go is a different question.

Standard IANAL disclaimer.

Edit: replaced copyright with license. Low caffeine morning.

It should also mean though that cross-posting to other sites like Kijiji (very common) could result in having take-down notices sent for your ad (- since it's an exclusive license you're granting them). [IANAL]

You're right. That's where the exclusive vs. non-exclusive copyright license comes into play. I also wonder what this will do to the rentals market. For instance, local realty company lists all their properties on their website and posts them on Craigslist to increase traction. Craigslist now sends the realty company a takedown notice, for the realtor's website listing, since they copied the listing onto CL. Depending on the level of enforcement CL pursues, this could have the effect of cooling professional usage of CL--especially by organizations that have to run things by legal first.

No it isn't.

The information that is used to build the ad remains open to be used wherever and whenever the poster wants. I believe this storm is caused by third parties leeching off their ads and not users posting the ad in multiple places. Let's not get too dramatic about it.

Correct, the information remains open--however, how many people are going to go about writing a new ad for each site they post on and make sure it's different enough to avoid triggering someone else's license protection? Reading real estate ads in the area, both on realty websites and Craigslist, they look almost identical.

"BRAND NEW CONDO 1BA 1Br wood floors!!!! sends us an email. $1200/mo!!"

If you take that same ad and post it on Craigslist and another ad service, the license with Craigslist gives them exclusive rights to the ad--if I'm reading this right it means they can then tell the 2nd ad service to take the content down since CL has the exclusive license. I'm not saying CL will do this, just that having that kind of license up front opens the door to such a scenario.

Craigslist is not asserting copyright, rather it is asserting that it is the exclusive licensee of the poster's copyright and wants to go after e.g. Padmapper on behalf of the poster.

You're right, I got my wording mixed up. Still doesn't change the argument though, if they're the only licensee of the content.

Thats a little dramatic.

CL isnt popular here in Holland, but i was under the impression, it was ebay meets dating, using a 200 byte php forum file, that looked so old, you would just assume encodimg errors.

Why are you getting your panties in a twist? What import role does this site play in your life or that of others?

Craigslist is gigantic in big US metro areas.

It's pretty much the standard way to find a place to live, to find an employee or a job, to buy and sell used cars, etc... etc...

It's also known for having 3 times higher revenue-per-employee than Google even though the vast majority of activity on the site is free.

I don't think people outside the US understand how large Craigslist is. I spend 1 hour, each work day, looking at the national OMPL gig feed after its been filtered for charity/stupidity/things I don't do, to see if I can pick up supplemental clients between larger accounts.

The amount of spam and high expectations / low financial reward is high, but a lot of my small business contracts are from Craigslist.

Craigslist is nowhere near that popular. It the largest secondary market for a lot of things, but for more people trade there car back to a dealer than use Craigslist etc.

the "ebay meets dating" impression is not correct. Craigslist is closer to an "Online Classified Ads" which is popular for posting jobs, apartment rentals, cars, sporting equipment, musical instruments, and pretty much everything else you might post in a classified ad.

I'm told it is one of the 100 most popular sites on the internet (and one of the 50 most popular in the US).

One of the reasons people feel strongly about it the platform nature. If you don't like the Craigslist interface for finding apartments, you don't have much choice. That is where everyone lists their apartments. Similarly, it is the first place everyone lists apartments because it is widely known that this is where users check.

For that reason, it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.

>> it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.

This. CraigsList's search features for cars are abysmal. AutoTrader.com, on the other hand, lets you do awesome stuff like "find me a Toyota or Honda sedan costing less than $12,000 within 15 miles of me", save that search, and get email alerts when new matches come in.

But in my market, all the sellers were on Craigslist.

Sucky network effects.

How was its seller interface?

bad

Alright. That sounds very anti competitive. And if they truly have a monopoly likely illegal as well.

I really wish, we had proper laws to deal with all these vendor lockin tricks. Its as if the free market, without proper regulation just ends up promoting innovation in loopholes that give an unfair advantage.

Everyone wants to be a cable company these days, and be selling access to customers. Instead of contributing something of actual value themselves, they just want to tax others when they do. Hijack the customer, and be the middle man.

They all essentially implement the same bussiness model as the mob.

It's not really anti-competitive, and it's very unlikely to be illegal. It's just a fairly classic natural monopoly.

There's only likely to be one major classified ad company, because advertisers want to use the site with the most users, and users want to use the site with the most classified ads. That's hard for a competitor to break into, not because of anticompetitive behavior by Craigslist, but because of the nature of the market.

As for the law, the general rule of thumb, in the US at least, is that it's not illegal to have a monopoly, but it is illegal to use your monopoly to dominate a second market.

Is it not abuse of your monopoly if you demand that their suppliers do not supply competitors?

Because thats essentially what this "exclusive" liscence entails?

I read it as this posting is exclusive. I can make a similar posting somewhere else. Sure, I can't copy-pasta, but if CraigsList thinks that because I post on their site that I can't post it on other sites as well I would LOVE to see them try to sue me.

You cant copy pasta your own content. I totally agree though: this will never hold up in court.

If they want to "own" user submitted content, they need a signature. Just putting some terms up will not suffice, unless the site "sell us your exclusive content" with big "make CL own this content" buttons.

I don't know about Holland, but CL is HUGE in the U.S, and I mean REALLY HUGE. I've sold stuff, rented apartments etc from CL, because that is where the crowd is. I know of people who use it for everything, and they are very happy. Takes a minute to post the ad, it is free, and even 70 year olds know it.

It is beyond me, why they refuse to improve the service. They could do it one small step at a time, carefully and slowly, so they don't upset their not so tech savvy audience (much of their audience falls in this category)

Things might change soon if they keep behaving this way, but at this moment, no-one comes close to CL (ebay may be, but you can't rent apartments from ebay)

It's the 9th most popular site in the US.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org

Without Craigslist people everywhere would have difficulty finding massage 'practitioners' and old couches. The horror!

What are some good alternatives?

Kijiji is pretty popular here in Canada.

Owned by eBay, as it happens. A long-time competitor (and part owner) of Craigslist.

In choosing between evils, I'll still stick with Craig.

Gumtree (also owned by eBay) is the CL for Australia, and I think they are making roads into the US and UK.

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