Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They're not settling with $1M donation to EFF, they're still getting $2.1M from Lovely.
So really they get more than $2.1M value out of this.
Edit: Yes, I realize there is no reason I should assume 10 equal payments over 10 years, given the information available. It was just the closest thing to an 'average case' I could define for a situation like this.
At least CL has an alert system now.
Craigslist doesn't even do a half-assed job trying to keep spam off, it has officially settled into the same place as eBay for me: a big, slow, shitty incumbent.
42floors is killing the commercial rental category.
OKC/Tinder killed the personals category.
There are three main categories keeping it alive: apartments, jobs and for sale. Each of those categories are under attack from semi-successful startups but no homeruns...yet.
If either For Sale or Jobs categories get an airbnb-like competitor, it will be a massive blow for CL. The former is its largest category. The latter makes it all the revenue. My hunch is that its Jobs category is already under attack and they are having a harder time making revenue resulting in their aggressive legal battles.
It solves the problem. It's ugly, sure, but a whole lot of people derive value from it, and that's what matters.
It's a money game.
"... this was decided by the supreme court definitively in unanimous decision regarding, for instance, phone numbers in the case Rural v. Feist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) ... The facts are just facts. They are not creative expressions. They are descriptive information and as such are outside of the bounds of what copyright law was intended to cover.
... In other industries it is a long-standing practice of comparing prices, supply and demand. My background at the federal reserve tells me, that’s how markets work. The concept, that it is intellectual property, when it’s really just transparency of price, supply, and demand, and that’s how markets work, is a real stretch. It’s something that could, if it continues to go this way, it could, basically, break the Internet, where you have to have permission to compare prices, and compare supply and demand between different sources of goods and services.
.. We just think that the business of “on-boarding” the postings and charging for it is entirely different from the search and downstream interaction."
It's tough because people don't exactly look for new houses every single day so coming up in their brain as the app/site of choice when they do need a new house/apt is difficult. I would hate to do a "better apartment finder" startup in this space (airbnb excluded).
I think craigslist grew pretty slowly over the course of a decade, right? Not sure there's a recipe for overtaking them quickly that doesn't involve using their data/userbase in one form or another.
If you did car sales (as a bad example), you could handle the entire process for customers - sending out a photographer, building the listing and researching an appropriate list price. Wear the costs until you have the brand established and can start to make money. That would probably be attractive to people who don't have time or aren't confident enough to do it all themselves.
I disagree that it's easy to take decent photos and then deal with a sales process (fielding calls, negotiating, etc). I have dozens of things I could sell but don't because it's too much effort and I don't have time.
A few months later my whole class, including the instructor, received cease and desist letters from CL. They had found our code on Github and demanded we take it lest we face legal consequences.
So apparently it's quite easy to piss of CL.
Convincing people to put stuff in your closed database just makes it so you will eventually become the incumbent villain. It also creates a legal target, as demonstrated by this story.
Imagine if anyone could download an extension that would scrape a little bit of craigslist, copying that information into a public shared database that wasn't even centrally hosted.