Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
What really amuses me is that in the Tweet highlighted, Craig is indeed implying that it is his money going to the EFF - who Opposed him in the legal case that lead to the money. So he should be called out for egregious bullying - using the threat of Criminal Sanction to get his way.
If an HN-friendly business (whatever that is) pulled the same move it would also be equally worthy of opprobrium.
I don't mind it being spartan - but that aside there are usability issues. One simple example is the reason things like PadMapper and HousingMaps became popular. Another example is that their categories are often hard to filter through. Lastly, there are trust issues - something like "connect to Facebook" would really go a long way in some transactions.
If anyone ever needed proof that monopolies crush innovation, this would be a good starting point.
Of course they "manage to beat" competitors, that's not hard for a monopolist. But it doesn't equate to "doing something right."
The whole suit is ridiculous from the consumer/society perspective. You can't argue that scraping Google to get CL listings harms CL in any way whatsoever. So the only TRUE reason to sue 3Taps (or their customers) is to retain the monopoly, plain and simple.
I'm starting to think that, on balance, CL may no longer be a net benefit to society.
The CFAA isn't the only set of laws that has both a criminal statute and a civil cause of action. Newmark didn't --- can't, in fact --- threaten anyone criminally. Craigslist's recourse to a statute that included a criminal component added no rigidity to the ball they were playing with, whatsoever. Since they were suing to enforce their own terms of service, the CFAA was the correct statute to cite.
Other people on this thread have also suggested that recourse to the CFAA was somehow a nuclear option for Craigslist. It was not. People think this because Techdirt is misleading them, in order to whip up rageviews. You should be irritated at them for doing that (it's pretty much their whole M.O.).
The only thing you can't do here is criticize Elon Musk.
Screw them.
[0]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-a...
I have a copy in my phone, unbelievable amounts of knowledge in my pocket, several libraries full. Would it somehow be better if information were harder to find?
There is certainly value in presenting everything via a consistent interface, as Wikipedia does. But there's also value is subject-specific interfaces. And I find Wikipedia's notability criteria very problematic; Wikipedia can't be treated as a sole source of truth when it simply refuses to include any information about certain subjects. (E.g. I wanted to know about a band I'd seen once, so I looked them up on Wikipedia only to find no page; I wondered if I'd spelled them wrong or some such. Then I looked them up on TV Tropes and found a useful page about them.)
I can easily imagine a public irc channel that ip blocks abusing users that post goatse links (not illegal in itself). If some of those users than bypass that block, is it unreasonable that the owner would want to sue in order to stop the abuse from the then unauthorized access to the irc server?
It seems reasonable to disagree about whether companies should have the right to prevent forks based on their public data sets ("can you fork the phone book?"). It does not seem reasonable to suggest that Craigslist sued simply in order to be tyrannical.
Or, for that matter, because somebody was using up their bandwidth, which is a finite resource, for something other than the intended purpose of the site.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
I like your analogy of the site being forked. I don't believe for a 2nd that the companies scraping the CL data and putting a pretty UX on it were doing it out of any sense of altruism.
To focus on the act of scraping itself, consider a case where they download the data and study it privately. That should not go to court, even if they broke the ToS, unless there are measurable damages.
edited: this said "for 3taps" before, but I'm not sure that's accurate.
You're saying this because Techdirt is manipulating you.
The CFAA is in fact the logical private cause of action for suits to enforce terms of service. It is literally the section of the US code about enforcing ToS's.
A civil suit is a civil suit. CFAA-derived civil suits are not especially more scary than other civil suits. It's scary to be sued by Craigslist no matter what. The CFAA has nothing to do with it.
You should be irritated at Techdirt for misinforming you solely to generate rageviews.
You'd file criminal charges against someone who breaks into your home every night to hurl racial slurs at you and keeps picking your lock no matter how many times you change the locks; why wouldn't you file criminal charges against someone who comes on to your channel/forum/etc. every day to harass your users and uses a number of proxies to change their IP no matter how many times you IP-ban them?
I think most of us are not so unhappy about the suing, although we may disagree with it. We're very unhappy about using CFAA, which passes the line into criminal penalties. So we're talking about initiating a process against someone who scraped your site that could land them in jail.
It's also preposterous to suggest that Craigslist somehow "passed the line into criminal penalties". Just because a section of the law also has criminal offenses specified does not make all invocations of that law criminal. Private parties can't criminally prosecute people. There was, obviously, no risk of criminal charges in this case.
Techdirt is, as usually, being manipulative in how they frame this story. The are the Internet's foremost amplifier of online law misinformation.
I've never met the man, but he seems to respect money? He doesn't look at the Internet as a way to become filthy rich? He seems to despise the filthy rich? I like that he takes the bus. The world needs more guys like this!
As to the lawsuit, I think he looked beyond simple data scraping; he knew a lot of us out here say one thing, but are looking to capitalize, and live like Lord Fauntleroy in the end? One day, hoping to give that TED talk, and let's not forget the finally marrying the cool chick with all that slick loot? And getting the eventual divorce?
Craig said no to the real money! I really thought he would sell out by now, but has stayed pretty modest.
From 3Taps own website right now:
"As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, which supported 3taps' position on the CFAA in this litigation, and continues to do great work for Internet freedom"
"As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, "
This is not really a donation.
It's only "specified" in Kidd's own blog post.
Your description might be fair in general, but this article is more substantive than the typical riler-upper. If you know of something that it misrepresents, by all means correct the record. But it doesn't misrepresent the info you quoted—on the contrary, it communicates it clearly and includes the exact same quote.
For example: the line, "Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he's giving his own money to EFF" was especially confusing since the proceeds of a lawsuit are in fact "his own money".
4th graf: Claims Craigslist relied on a "tortured" definition of CFAA, linking to another Techdirt story about a judge's upholding of Craigslist's claims on two different counts. "Torturous" here means "the suggestion that access was unauthorized after Padmapper received a cease and desist from Craigslist's lawyers, and changed IP addresses to evade a ban.
6th graf: Techdirt grossly misrepresents Orin Kerr, perhaps assuming readers won't click through to the Volokh story they quote out of context. Kerr sees the ruling as a missed opportunity to more rigidly define "unauthorized access" as "circumvention of technical controls" but does not disagree with the ruling. HN readers in general would not be happier in a world where Kerr's view of the CFAA was reliably enforced.
Most importantly, I think: the article also never makes the argument it teases in its headline: at no point is it ever made clear how Newmark has "made the CFAA worse".
This is a defect density rate worthy of early-period PHP Wordpress.
Your normal instinct about Techdirt is almost always going to be right. It's not a good site. I'm glad it's penalized. Penalize it more.
The idea that "unbiased" reporting exists is a modern myth. There is bias in simply deciding the topic to report on.
The modern idea that "unbiased" is somehow a virtue just leads to the CNN phenomenon where every story has to have two sides regardless of what the situation actually is.
One of the purposes of journalism is to make the decisions about what is "news" and what is junk. Obviously these criteria are going to depend on a lot of personal interpretation, so the key to good reporting is to know and understand how the reporter judges a story - their bias - so their reporting can be properly weighted.
In this sense, techdirt is quite open an obvious with their bias, and is fairly consistent in style, which is something I wish I saw a lot more at "news" websites.
(how you interpret that bias is another matter entirely)
As for their content, while I agree techdirt can be one sided at times, I have never seen any serious lies, either direct or by omission. Maybe I've just missed them?
Speaking of which, I don't see how reposting a quote that was included in the techdirt article is supposed to be evidence of them being "one sided" or "not even trying to actually represent the truth".
The product is bare bones, but it works just as well as it ever has, which is a heck of a lot better than many web applications from the last 10 years, loaded down with animations and piles of tracking javascript and auto-playing video ads and broken reimplementations of standard browser features.
Personally I find it works better for me than most google web properties since about 2008 (e.g. the new versions of gmail and google maps), better than recent versions of facebook, better than yelp, better than a lot of current newspaper websites, etc. There’s something to be said for plain html websites.
I do wish craigslist would let other people scrape their pages and provide alternative user interfaces though. Pad mapper was a great help when I needed to look for an apartment several years ago.
[edit for grammar which alas is not quite perfect yet]
If people are not satisfied with CL, they should build a better CL from scratch and stay away from CN's product.
The problem is that Padmapper saw that there were no red Camry's and decided to build and sell their own red Camry's, using Toyota's parts.
The functionality has changed (improved) dramatically since 15 years ago. For example there is now a map view for many search results. Searches of "for sale" listings now default to a gallery view. In fact the entire infrastructure for accepting and displaying images is new; Craigslist launched as a text-only website, and embedding images was a messy hack for years.
In general the data structure has been enhanced to collect more and more finely grained pieces of information by which searchers can filter their results. To name on example I've used, selling a boat on Craigslist now has its own set of dedicated fields for attributes like length, manufacturer, model, power source, even the number of hours on the engine.
The one thing that hasn't changed is the visual aesthetic. It's still plain-Jane HTML. But there are plenty of ugly-but-functional websites that do very well: Wikipedia, Google, and even Facebook are boring designs on top of really rich server-side content.
It doesn't follow the latest web9.0 flat^Wmaterial^Wlook-a-monkey! design trends?
The interface remains usably utilitarian?
They don't try to capitalize to create an uber-exit that everyone can write a congratulatory comment on YC/TechCrunch about? Great hustle Craig!
Or is it just that you're of the Uber-style ethical camp that believes in disruption-through-cost-externalization? In this case, actively extracting value from Craigslist, despite their protests, and using it to undermine their business.
It's that the product could be better -- as in better features -- in a bout a million ways. How about notifying me when something becomes available for instance... Or showing a map view of apartment listings or heck all listings... Or a bit a zillion search possibilities...like -- here's one -- searching across a whole region or farther for a given item... Or some kind of attempt at reputation building as an option...
That list took maybe 90 seconds... My theory is that they are lazy because they can afford to be and they aggressively defend their laziness by suing anyone who tries to make it better. Finks.
I still don't see anywhere to search across regions. If you've ever tried to find a hard to find car you'd understand what I mean there. I'd like to search in, say, all of California. Can't do it.
My point is that there's a lot that could be done that will not be done because they won't let people scrape even if they link back. So, for example, say I wanted to add a state-wide search. Even if all my search results pointed back to CL, CL would cease and desist me. This goes for other enhanced functionality as well. This is all legal, but see it for what it is: an aggressive use of their position to retain their position, which includes squelching any and all uses of their data. It's an anit-competitive move that let's them maintain what, in my opinion, is a very poor quality product for all the traffic and data they get.
The UK has 243,610 square kilometers. California alone has 423,970.
CL makes no effort to stop people from publishing or viewing ads on other sites. Many multi-posting tools exist, especially for housing.
Agreed. I gave up on my first experience trying to rent an apartment after getting obviously sketchy responses emails from my inquiries, that was after I had spent hours sifting through the listings and only messaging the few listing that didn't look like scams. It's amazing how difficult it was to find where the approximate location, which definitely would have helped with some very simple non-js map. It shouldn't be that difficult to get a valid description of what I'm looking for.
Have you checked CL personals lately? All you'll find are chirping crickets.
Craigslist's product is its userbase. It is by all accounts a fabulously successful product.
You want be able to see past the AngularJS and D3 and iOS-first and responsive UX stuff to the meat of what a real value proposition is. You don't want to be held hostage to fashion.
I would hope that EFF does not give it back but uses it to continue the good fight or donate it to another, unrelated, charity if they believe the money is tainted.
I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent.
Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring.
In the long run I want to cover every occupation in which one can find a job by applying through the employer's website.
I won't monetize it in any way. Or perhaps I could say I will monetize it by offering my consulting services through my website, as I always have. Providing free content on my site results in sales leads.
You know most people make compensation part of their decision on who to work for / who to hire? You can get money out of any kind of hiring..
What I do regard as corruption, is when a recruiter convinces a manager that they can find qualified staff, then expect thirty grand in commissions by placing someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started,
I'll bite. What the heck does this mean?
I am good at my work, I take pride in it but recruiters commonly solicit me for perm or contract work for which I am completely unqualified. For example I do osx device drivers and windows gui so on a damn near daily basis I am approached by recruiters who want to submit me for windows device driver work, even at microsoft.
Their applicant tracking systems other do not support exact phrase matching or the recruiters dont know what it is. Neither do they ever attempt to read my resume, not even when they do submit me.
Many of my "colleagues" were obvious imposters who found work through recruiters. The recruiters dont care, they get paid, see.
You have opinions and your HN profile indicates that you've been programming for a long time, but that doesn't appear to have any relevance to your opinions on hiring.
Oh, BTW, you have some mojibake in the Education section of your online resume.
[0] Numerically, most recruiters suck. This has nothing to do with hiring. :)
Oddly that page has utf-8 encoding. The mojibake were em-dashes in the original OO document, I don't clearly recall but likely copied it to the clipboard, then to textwrangler for OS X than marked up the HTML.
textwrangler can do every text encoding but it is fiddly to actually get it right.
Get A Load of:
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/ya-kazakh/
Russian for "I Am A Cossack!", more or less I have a bad attitude and fear no one.
The mojibake would be trivial to fix but my position is that I should not have to, I leave it there in hopes someone at Apache or Mozilla will clue into it.
a) Be randomly reading your online resume.
b) Think that the mojibake contained within was the fault of some software that they maintained.
Additionally, I've had occasion to work with many, many people. I've found that -regardless of brilliance and competency- folks with bad attitudes almost always make bad coworkers. :)
Anyway. I hope you come to understand why your declarations about your side projects tend to mystify people, and why your strongly held stances tend to not gain traction with others. All the best, man.
Carefully inspect -in a good text editor- the files that you have asked your web server to serve. I suspect that you will discover that what is being delivered to the browser is exactly what is in the files on disk. :)
Or, view source on your personal page. (Notice that the page is served up as UTF-8, so that what is served up will be what was on disk.) Here is a snippet of what's served up, verbatim:
<p>Español Mexicano, Español Castellano: "MEE-gə-LEET-oh".</p>
<p>Por Favor? Español Americano Centrale? Español Americano del Sur? "mə-LEET-oh".
"G" Silencio!</p>
<p>Я name is Міша. Я казах!</p>When google has an opening they post it on their own site.
My index provides three items of value: a list of tech employer organized geographically, links to their jobs pages and link to their contact pages.
Its not always obvious what businesses are in one's city. Quite commonly jobs are posted on corporate sites but the jobs section of their own sites arent linked from anywhere. I often have to guess:
example.com/careers example.com/careers.htm example.com/about/jobs.aspx
Im working on a python program that will try out all the common locations.
Among the reasons that startup companies fail is that their websites are steaming piles.
So... you're entirely unlike CL jobs postings.
Thats because I dont regard craigslist job postings as useful to anyone.
I built my first index just for santa cruz county, on north monterey bay, to assist my coworkers in bailing from live picture because kate mitchell got the bright idea to shorten her commute by moving our office to san jose.
Just before our announced IPO, there was a reverse seven to one stock split, Kate resigned, live picture declared bankrupcy.
Dont Piss Me Off.
"Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days.
I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent."
Instead, your site is effectively a rolodex of companies who hire tech workers.
While this isn't useless, it's completely unlike CL. Frankly, I can see almost noone[0] spending money on a Rolodex entry. I would regard anyone who did spend money on such a thing with a huge amount of suspicion.
And, uh, I've gotten a couple of really good, solid job offers through CL jobs postings, so they were quite useful to me.
[0] "Almost", because people spend money on unreasonable things all the time.
Yes I too have found good work through craigslist, but cl is far less effective than were the yellow pages in the phonebook.
Many companies never pay to advertise open positions, instead they post them on their own websites, then do not understand why no one applies.
I have received the greatest enthusiasm from residents of san luis obispo, california. there is lots of tech there but before my index no one knew how to find it.
> ...cl is far less effective than were the yellow pages...
I find it hard to believe that -for all but the best of the best- cold-calling companies in the hopes that they have a job for you is more effective than contacting companies that have indicated their need to hire someone that possesses a skill set similar to yours.
Job hunting is hard enough. Cold calling every company that employs programmers seems like it is its own circle of Hell. Maybe you're just so good at what you do that people clear a space for you whenever you come knocking, regardless of their current staffing situation. For the rest of us, cold calling is a colossal waste of everyone's time.
> I have received the greatest enthusiasm from residents of san luis obispo, california. there is lots of tech there but before my index no one knew how to find it.
Uh. http://slo.craigslist.org/ ? Problem solved, since mid 2005 [0]. Job postings in that area are free of charge, too! :) ( To compare, your site has only been live since early 2014 [1].)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050617021840/http://slo.craigs...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140319023933/http://www.warpli...
The court ruling is at http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi... and is surprisingly readable.
As someone deeply interested in UNIX history, it's also revisionist and dismissive of hard fought wins by people who don't cower like he did -- real UNIX is incredibly successful to this day.. SysV (Solaris/Illumos), BSD, etc.
> I was asked for my advice, there was a clear cut right answer, that would have been good for the company and good for the future of the internet, but would have upset my bosses.
> Instead, I kept my mouth shut to help my career. This makes me "grown as a person" and "politically and socially clueful".
No, it makes you a jerk.
> btw, running craigslist is a "public service" and makes me a "philanthropist".
So you've given away the $400 million you made off craigslist, then? No? Then you're a delusional jerk.
1. Why is that? I think the most relevant field of US law with that sort of provision is trademark law, which shouldn't have been at issue here at all (3taps and Padmapper were not pretending to be Craigslist or authorized by Craigslist). Copyright law, which is sorta relevant, does not have such a provision. If your song gets pirated, you can sue only the pirates named Fred without losing your right to sue. The CFAA, which is definitely relevant here, does not have such a provision: JSTOR does not have their hands full with CFAA cases against everyone who ever sent an article to a colleague or friend.
2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? That would have sidestepped any such concern, without setting a precedent that everyone else must get API access. I think it's pretty clear from this case that they did not want to see Padmapper exist, and regardless of whether they were obligated to sue and try to shut them down, they clearly wanted to sue and shut this particular application down.
Maybe they didn't want to?
This is the first topic I've seen were the HN's usual Libertarian bias disappears and no-one challenges the underlying notion that CL is seen as part of the Commons. Channelling Dagny Taggart, I'd say 3Tap & PadMapper were a bunch of moochers.
Nothing blocking listings... OR PadMapper...
Not even close.
The issue is that CL and this judge have set a precedent (I think?) that private companies can make up felonies by deciding what "authorized access" is.
You wanna sue a business for scraping your site? Hey, fine, that's a civil business issue. (And really, there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways. Or at least there should be some level of malicious intent required.) Trying to use a law with criminal/felony penalties is grossly out-of-line.
Are you sure about that? So you don't want any legal recourse for someone that overloads your API/web servers with thousands of requests per second? You might say a technical solution (like rate limiting) would do - but that will cost you time & money with no upside, and can be easily circumvented (use many clients in parallel with the same effect - hammering your server and increasing your costs)
I think a law for that is fine, as a last resort. It will keep people at their best behaviour.
> there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways.
A limit on red cars is a limit on "the color" of cars, but it's not a limit on "that color" when someone is pointing at a blue car.
So when "that kind" refers to sanely-implemented scraping, then there should not be a limit. There is a limit on "the kind", to restrict it to activities like scraping that aren't inherently harmful.
For the record, I maintain my belief that there should be a law that applies to scraping of publicly available sites.
> You wanna sue a business for scraping your site? Hey, fine, that's a civil business issue. (And really, there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways
And the CFAA also happens to be the law that makes it a civil business issue, thanks to the 1030(g) section that was amended in 1996. Wikipedia has elected to make no mention of this section, but other sources do.
http://www.balch.com/files/Publication/01d78bb1-08f4-4a25-8c...
"Section 1030(g) expressly provides the civil remedy (and thus federal court subject matter jurisdiction) for violation of the CFAA"
* The legal documents don't mention any payment (required or otherwise) to EFF.
* The EFF doesn't mention any payment (required or otherwise) from CL.
* Only 3taps' own blog mentions this, which the article quotes extensively without attribution.
Perhaps EFF should earmark his donation in a fund specifically dedicated to legal defense against any future CFAA suits filed by Craigslist?
1. Craigslist donated a bunch of money to somebody (which seems like a good thing)
2. Craigslist sued some company for scraping their data and using it in violation of their Terms of Service. And won a settlement. (which seems like a good thing)
So in short, good job Craigslist. Why is the author so angry?
Because you didn't really read the article (or possibly the article isn't well written but I understood it)
1. Your order of events is wrong. Craigslist sued. Won. Then used the proceeds from the lawsuit to donate. This isn't money earned normally.
2. The problem is the lawsuit itself. Craigslist is abusing a law that is meant to deal with hackers intruding on someone's private network. Visiting someone's publicly accessible website and access publicly accessible data is not intruding on someone else's network. Chances are other 3rd parties will now start to abuse this law. i.e. This somewhat reminds me of companies suing people for summarizing a news article into a blog post and linking back to the name original article. In this case, I believe the 3rd parties were creating embedded Google Maps based on the addresses found on Craigslist listing (because Craigslist pre-lawsuit refused to do so) and linking back to the original listing.
TDLR Craigslist successfully stopped a company from fair use of their public content by accusing them of hacking into their network. Craigslist then donates some of the proceeds of lawsuit's 'damages' to the EFF.
So yes, they sued before donating. And yes, they used the proceeds. But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.
Even reading your comment (or its sibling that was posted during the same minute) gives enough information to come to that conclusion.
Craigslist said "don't scrape our data". This other company scraped their data and used it to build their business, so Craigslist sued. That's exactly the world I'd like to live in.
Yes because from the little that you wrote, it didn't sound like you understood any of it. Maybe you should elaborate more from the start?
> But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.
You're wrong.
1. Craigslist killed two companies in the process. The worse part is that if Craigslist only listened to its users and improved their website, none of this would have even happened.
2. Now any company can stop anyone from fair use of their content. All they have to do is accuse them of Craigslists' definition of hacking under the CFAA. e.g. news sites can now potentially threaten companies like Google with the CFAA for listing their articles on Google News
3. Maybe if the scraping led to an outright copy of Craigslist's listing content I can understand. However, they were transforming that content into something more (something that Craigslist refused to do on their own site for years), kind of what Google does with search results. Moreover they were linking back to the original post (attribution).
4. Just because there's a term or clause in a TOS, it doesn't mean that it's legal.
5. The main result from this is to help maintain the entrenchment of the status quo which hurts overall innovation.
Really we should start here: are you familiar with Fair Use?
... but they didn't. Those two companies killed themselves by building their entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to use.
And it's not like they were led to believe that the data was usable. It was clearly marked as not usable, for the exact purpose they used it for.
It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the internet, it's fair game to use. But it's not. Thankfully.
Chances are we're both wrong (you legally and me libertarianally). But the only thing we've established here is that we disagree.
I disagree. You're implying that Craigslist was passive, and they were just watching from the sidelines. They weren't. They sued.
> building their entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to use.
This is our main point of contention, and we'll probably just agree to disagree.
> It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the internet, it's fair game to use.
imo it depends on how you use it. Unless I misunderstood something, if we had it your way we wouldn't even be able to write wikipedia articles based on data gleaned from online content even with attribution unless the owner gives permission
And the bit where a very dubious interpretation of the CFAA which is opposed by the EFF was used as the legal basis to sue 3Taps...
Check out Nextdoor.com. I've been using it for a while and it's better in literally every single way. It's now just a matter of time while they scale.
Craigslist may not track your actions, but it doesn't ever update it's UI/UX or add features so there's no reason for Craigslist to collect user behavior data.
Now I completely respect your personal choice, but for others who are more willing to try out something that can provide them real value, I think Nextdoor will win over Craigslist every time.
Your analogy of communism may be entirely too apt, given how communism played out in practice last century. Sure, you got the overthrow of the capitalist economy, but if you were a tiny country who didn't really want to agree with Moscow on everything, sucks to be you.
And Uber's "fuck the rules" are on a totally different level than sending HTTP requests to a server to aggregate publicly accessible information.
2. Provider of a service can set out terms of service
3. When using someone else resource, it is polite to do as asked ("Please don't finish all the staples" or "Please don't use my stapler John. Jane can still use it")
Increasing CLs server load & increasing their bandwidth costs was morally questionable, it became clearly immoral once they knew CL didn't like what they were doing.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this part. If I say, "John's website is at this address," John doesn't get to say "HEY! I get to decide who links to me," because copyright isn't for facts, it's for content. That's why I disagree so vehemently with the PadMapper decision: All they were saying was "There's a CL post for this address." That's not content, and it's certainly not enough content to replace the functionality CL sued over.
Also, FWIW 3taps wasn't using the CraigsList servers: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/3taps-countersues...
I'd also be surprised to find a real increase in load, if the scraping service served end users. Otherwise those users would be requesting directly to CL. And, if the 3rd party service worked by riding on the back of users (say, via a browser add-on), would that suddenly change things?
Padmapper mined data (apartment locations, prices, number of bedrooms, URL to Craigslist post), not creative presentation. Even if we believe that it's somehow morally reasonable for Craigslist to have copyright over the text of user postings, the data Padmapper required was clearly not copyrightable. This was a CFAA case, not a copyright case.
(Yes, in practice Padmapper also displayed descriptions and photos, but they could have avoided doing so, and the service would still have been useful.)
Their aggressively litigious nature makes it difficult for others to compete and provide better services. It's difficult to penetrate the network effect juggernaut if you can't scrape their existing ads.
> "If someone can do better than free, go right ahead."
It's hard to compete with an entity that uses the coercive power of the state to squash you.