Craigslist is a very cool company. They are basically a communistic approach to the internet. I say all the more power to them. If someone can do better than free, go right ahead.
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.
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.