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?
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 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.