When you can't beat them, sue them into the ground.
Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it. The alternatives somehow manage to be even more spectacularly useless by over-designing their apps and cluttering them up with junk.
Padmapper is one of the few that does what they're supposed to do, and it's not even an optimal implementation of this sort of thing.
No doubt about that, I just don't know if padmapper is really trying to be the next Craigslist. Sure, you can list your pad, but you can't buy a bike or get a job (hand or otherwise) on padmapper, afaik.
If these were articles written by professional writers, you might have a case. Instead these are posts written by many different individuals trying to advertise their properties.
Craigslist didn't write a single one of those posts. They try and assert control over this content through their terms of service:
"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."
The last part of that may not be enforceable. They're asserting that they are singularly responsible for "authorizing" reproduction despite not having copyright for the material in question.
Craiglist doesn't need to write those posts. Under their TOS, Craiglist has a license to the posts (which are copyrighted by their owners ). This license gives Craiglist the authority to enforce copyright against persons who interfere with Craigslists' license in the posts. Thus, the last sentence of their TOS is perfectly legal and enforceable. The license would not give Craiglist a license to do anything to other services on which the original posters also post their listings to. But that is not the case here.
They are plenty of cases where copyright enforcement is voluntarily handed over to a third-party: for example, Hollywood to the MPAA, or the BusyBox developers to the SFLC. Does anyone know what the difference is?
Righthaven is different. Righthaven did not have a copyright use license, so it did not have the right to enforce the copyright. (A copyright enforcement "license" is a non-license, legally, since it does not convey any actual copy "right" such as distribution.)
Craiglist does have a copyright use license, and thus has the right to enforce the license it has been granted.
> Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it.
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.
Why was Sourceforge so tough to displace, aside from no one having the will to do it?
Craigslist controls a two-sided market. If I build a new site, I can't get buyers without there already being sellers. And vice-versa. That's an incredibly difficult business problem.
Github seems to have had it easier. I can just host my new project on github and be done with it (my website links to it after all). I'm sure sourceforge had some value just by being the go-to place, but how strong was the network effect from a developer perspective?
To deconstruct the SourceForge decline, which felt as painfully slow as the glacially slow erosion of IE 6 market share, it's important to recognize it in context.
SourceForge and its related properties were the backbone of the early web, supporting a number of important efforts to which people felt a strong allegiance. It was like a benevolent force at the time.
SourceForge had, at the time, a fairly formal process for registration. They considered themselves more like a library where getting shelf space was a privilege not doled out lightly. This is not unlike how getting into the Yahoo! directory required a lot of begging and pleading.
While this meant that most of the projects hosted by it had a lot of merit, those lesser efforts were left out in the cold. They failed to switch to a more casual model as the "Web 2.0" philosophy started being the dominant mind-set, where expectations shifted dramatically from carefully curated content to emergent user-driven communities.
Also worth noting, GitHub's pace of innovation is so far beyond nearly anything else in the industry that it was only a matter of time before they became the superior platform in terms of technology.
Additionally they were able to ride the surge of popularity that git was gaining, something that SourceForge didn't support at the time, and persuaded a number of high-profile projects to move to them. The real coup was Ruby on Rails, which once hosted there, solidified their position.
Any Craiglist displacer would need to swing a few important, strategic deals to cement it in the minds of people as a reasonable alternative. The rest would be a case of just driving harder than Craiglist is willing to keep up with.
CL won because it got the first mover advantage, and now benefits greatly from network effects. It could be much improved over what it is, but it has little incentive to change now.
So because the private licensing terms offered were not optimal for PadMapper, it follows that PadMapper should just ignore their public licensing altogether?
People insist on using it not because it has a good user experience, but because of content. It has a terrible user experience. Don't confuse the two things.
For instance, many payroll companies have truly awful sites, yet people use them since they have no other choice.
As a specific example, searching for an apartment should not mean reading every single listing in order to discern where the property is, what features are available, and what conditions apply. That people post the same listing repeatedly until it is rented is not helping matters.
eBay, which is arguably still quite primitive, has much better filtering options, alerts, and a single listing that persists until the auction is completed. Craiglist is a series of random, repetitive posts with only a minimum of categorization.
Padmapper provided a superior way to navigate listing data and present it in a much more meaningful presentation. Being able to "favorite" listings helps when filtering.
I'd be interested to see interaction studies in the non-tech community about Craigslist, because I haven't seen a person in non-tech find difficulty in posting on Craigslist.
Also, don't confuse my opinions about Craigslist's design/UX with an opinion on the case. I've used Padmapper extensively. While I believe that Craigslist has a right to do what they please with their content, I don't see what Padmapper was doing as wholly legally wrong.
Craiglist has a great UX for a classifieds board: location > type of listing > listings by date.
It may look butt ugly, but it is as close to a functionally efficient classifieds board as you can get. Craigslist isn't trying to be anything more than that.
For many classified ads, this is true. However, for most people "location" being defined on a city-wide (or for some rural areas) state-wide basis is nowhere near an effective location filter for apartment/housing. Most people I know have a fairly short list of neighborhoods/locations that they want to live, and it's a huge pain to find those postings in craigslist's interface.
This doesn't mean that PadMapper is right, from a legal standpoint, but I think it's fair to say that craigslist's UX is terrible, for apartment/house searches (where small variations in location matter a LOT) at least.
They're running a service called 'craiggers' that scrapes Craigslist listings and sells an API. It's clear trademark infringement. Why would we feel bad for them?
Alright, perhaps one can argue the name is too close.
But craiggers provides a very valuable service, namely showing pictures of items as you search. It made furniture searching so much easier.
I have zero sympathy for craigslist. They didn't get into their position through "years of hard work". They won the lottery (someone had to win it). They have done zero innovation (other than maybe anti-spam) for years and prevent others from innovating on top. Society wins if they are forced to open their data.
But many startups do not have reasonable business plans. They have crazy business plans that everyone knows will fail, except sometimes they don't. Many startups have begun knowing they were going to be sued, knowing they were going to have legal and publicity problems. That's the nature of the disruptive business that everyone wants to be in these days.
>Many startups have begun knowing they were going to be sued
Name one startup that began knowing they were going to be sued and went on to a successful exit.
Parenthetically, the original Napster, the one that began knowing it would be sued, was sold about 3 years after its founding for less than $2.5 million as part of bankruptcy proceedings -- and I doubt that the owners took any significant dividends out of its before its sale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster#Current_status
I never made the argument that these companies were looking for successful exits. I'm not sure how you read that into my post. I were merely saying there are some companies that are started even when the founder knows there is a very low chance of defending the company legally. This article is one such point. One that comes to mind where the founder was actively looking to be sued was the OnLive Windows competitor.
Some do it to prove a point, some do it to prove that the market exists.
Here's a nugget from the article which I didn't hear anything about in the previous Padmapper postings and chat here on HN:
"The company said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
I wonder what would happen if their mobile app was simply a browser shell pointing to a mobile-optimized website. That mobile-optimized website could be accessible from a desktop, though unadvertised.
This kind of market segmentation through restrictive content licenses is something I'd expect from Hollywood, not Craigslist. It's extremely distasteful and they should feel bad. There's simply no good reason to allow mobile apps but prohibit web apps. Would Craigslist offer a license to a Firefox OS app? How about a Chrome OS app?
that is actually the point at which i lost sympathy for craigslist. they can license the data or not, but if they do they should not get to demand where and how it is used
Why is craigslist going after people who bring them traffic? Is it because they don't bring in much money themselves so they have to sell licenses? I've never really thought about craigslists business model. I assume it's almost entirely ad based / premium placement of your ad on their site based.
From a Wired article, circa 2009 (so this may be out of date):
"Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either."
Usually, when companies get mad about scraping, it's because it's either bypassing the ads that make them money, or in rare cases bypassing a premium API. Here, PadMapper is doing neither.
In fact, if Craiglist is so committed to not updating their ugly website, why don't they just license out a public API, killing two birds (new monetization strategy and having a better interface for free) with one stone?
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a smart business decision to me. It would just make sense to pursue this new revenue stream, and license out an API. This response just seems like more of an emotional response than a business strategy.
Edit: Not sure why this comment is getting down-voted, but if I offended some one that was not my intention.
The first step to beating Craigslist at apartment listings is to get everyone to use a different front-end. (ie. Padmapper) Then you offer a way to create listings entirely within that front-end and bypass Craigslist entirely. CL becomes little more than a backend database, and eventually goes out of business as no one needs to use it anymore.
Craiglist doesn't get traffic from PadMapper. PadMapper gets nearly all of its traffic from Craiglist. Craiglist can charge for mobile licenses because people want the traffic that Craiglist can bring them.
PadMapper gets no traffic from Craigslist. Craiglist gets traffic from PadMapper.
PadMapper is basically a pointer to a listing on Craigslist (when Craigslist listings are the reference), where you can search the pointers with filtering that you can't on Craigslist. In order to get to PadMapper, you have to visit the site directly.
The same reason facebook bought instagram: craigslist doesn't want any other web site's userbase to become the kernel for a replacement listing service.
Once you have a web site that attracts buyers, you can replace craigslist data with your own listing service and stop paying for their API.
They clearly don't fear this kind of competition in the mobile space, hence offering licenses for mobile-only API use.
A key part of building a business around stealing IP is getting acquired by a big firm that can fight legal battles. YouTube executed well on this plan; I'm curious how Padmapper planned for this obvious development.
s/stealing IP/behaving in a manner that may be or may not be stealing IP but probably looks enough like stealing IP to a judge to pass legal muster and require an expensive legal defense/g
The point is that simply defending against the lawsuit could kill Padmapper. Lots of time, money, and energy go into lawsuits. Conveniently, those are three things startups don't typically have in excess. The outcome doesn't matter for Padmapper if Padmapper dies during the defense.
If you're going to downvote me, that's fine, but if you do, please show how copyright infringement does not fit within the definition of stealing. I'd like to settle this semantic debate once and for all.
nice. you just proved that they are stealing by stealing from Merriam-Webster!
or are you going to say it's fair use?
i for one advertised places in craigslist and search for places on padmapper. I loved that my listing showed up for free and without me moving a finger on padmapper, and i found it much bette to find a place using padmapper's interface.
now, posting on craigslist has lost value for me. as my post will not be on that nice interface for people to find.
So, as far as you may prove they are stealing craigslist data, they sure as hell are not 'stealing' my data that i post at craigslist.
So, i don't think it fits the last word of your stolen definition "make use of wrongfully".
Are you referring to stealing in terms of ethics, or theft in terms of the legal system? Ethics are subjective, so I don't really want to go down that road. In terms of US law, however, the Supreme Court case Dowling v. United States found that "interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud." (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Theft )
edit: Ok, I won't be so cryptic. Padmapper doesn't copy the posts on Craigslist, they link to them. That's not a semantic quibble. All search engines do so. If I blogged that I was renting my apartment and linked to the Craigslist post describing it, I would be doing exactly what Padmapper is doing.
I think there is a significant difference between copying data, and just giving pointers to CL's data.
However,
If I blogged that I was renting my apartment and linked to the Craigslist post describing it, I would be doing exactly what Padmapper is doing.
This doesn't line up in a few ways. Padmapper is a third-party, not the original poster. There is also a distinction between doing it as a one-off and doing it in an automated fashion.
Padmapper needs to make it trivial for people to "upload" their listings from CL to PM. It could be a single bookmarklet.
Now, suppose that Alice tells Padmapper about Bob's apartment for rent on CL. That's getting even weirder, but PM might be okay if they follow DMCA safe harbour procedures.
Right. I've already agreed that there is a significant difference between displaying copies of CL listings and just having pointers to them.
It doesn't seem, however, that the link is the crux of CL's complaint. Rather it's the fact that PM has copied CL's data in order to generate a mapping of physical locations to CL listings.
You can't copyright data, only its expression. That a certain apartment is available for rent is a fact. The text that appears on the CL website is one expression of that fact. The map that appears on Padmapper is another expression of the same fact.
Of course. From their TOS: "You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post."
The listing data that is presented and rendered on Padmapper's site isn't linked (e.g. the price & # of bedrooms). That is, I don't have to click a link to go to the original site to view the content.
Padmapper does link to images, but Padmapper would be useless if it didn't also re-publish the content jacked from Craigslist.
I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps you are, and you are certain that the facts of the complaint will be grounds for summary dismissal. My limited legal knowledge leads me to believe this will not happen, which would mean that Padmapper is going to bleed money, time, and energy until the case is resolved.
That was my main point; it's fairly useless for non-attorneys to argue legal cases on HN (my apologies if you're a lawyer and I'm just wasting your time).
No, you're right. I'm not a lawyer either, and Padmapper is definitely in a tough position. I'm mostly arguing against the characterization of Padmapper as "stealing content." Most people here seem to think that Padmapper is in the wrong and it's only a question of whether they can get away with it.
AFAICT, Padmapper is doing something very much in line with what journalists and search engines have traditionally done. That point of view may not prevail in court, but I think it's completely defensible on ethical grounds.
Because it's copyright infringement, that's what it is, no one disagrees on that. Using "steal" tries to load copyright violations with a specific meaning, and that is not agreed on. It frames the debate, and people take issue with that as it creates a more emotional and less objective discussion.
There ought to be a rule that when someone reaches for the dictionary in a debate they've already lost. I keep seeing this on HN - a dictionary is probably the worst place go find out about what a word really means.
I hear people say "They stole my idea!" or if they hear a familiar melody, "They stole that from The Doors!"
So the dictionary agrees with the common use of steal in the realm of intellectual property. It's really the proponents of copyright violation who have redefined stealing to exclude copyrighted digital media.
It's all framing, I'd be happy if we stopped arguing over the word "steal" all the damned time instead of addressing the finer points of copyright and its role in our society.
The people who will whip out dictionaries over "steal" are crudely trying to inject an emotional response into the debate and trying to override rational discourse with rhetoric.
The people who are constantly whipping out "you still have it" are naively pretending that, just because it doesn't fit within all the criteria of physical theft, it also means that the other moral concerns associated with it are equally moot.
tl;dr: Both sides of the "stealing!" debate are being incredibly disingenuous.
I'm very interested in the outcome of this as I am building a service similar to Padmapper in the sense that it uses data from other sources to make a better user experience for people, and I'd love to include Craigslist (Would be a big supplier of data for my users), but I don't want to deal with these types of things so I have been leaving it out.
I think the key thing here is that you have to talk to your data sources. You have to use their data source the way they want you to, or come to some sort of agreement (licensing or somesuch), else you are moving into the same legal territory Padmapper was in and risk getting sued.
The suit is understandable, but I wish craigslist would get over themselves already and allow users to look at listings on a map. That's all anyone really wants here, and this is getting a bit ridiculous.
After spending 2 weeks searching Craigslist posting for a new rental in SF, I'm convinced that Padmapper gains nothing by using their data. Most listings appear to be scams.
I also learned Eric is a smarmy liar who dresses up what's good for him (and his pocketbook) in ludicrous claims that he's doing it for me, and the good of the people! And because he doesn't want you to waste your time, he needs to run this service that exists to make him money. His post was transparent self serving horseshit.
My logical brain says that suing Padmapper is perfectly reasonable. My emotional brain is crying at the idea of using raw Craigslist ads to find an apartment the next time I move to a new city.
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.
Yeah, I'm in a similar position. Every time I have to use Craigslist I come much closer to hating the team behind it. I mean, I know it's probably not rational, but I think they are being shitty people for locking up so much useful data behind a site that is designed to be miserable to use. It's pretty evil when you get down to it. It's obvious they don't care about users.
That's ridiculous. Craigslist lets you refine your search down to the neighborhood. It's not that hard to use. People find apartments on there all the time.
Depends on which Craigslist you use -- the neighborhood listings aren't particularly granular, and neighborhoods themselves aren't fixed, so one person's Glen Park (for instance) could be another's Outer Mission. Using a map is an uncontestedly superior interface for organizing geographic data. People find apartments on Craiglist despite the interface.
This is not to address the issue of ownership of listing data, or the case law, which latter isn't settled anyway.
Just because you don't like the interface, does not give you license to steal their data. I think HN is fairly ugly, but that doesn't mean I have a right to scrape the site in order to reproduce a slightly better looking, for-profit clone. At least not without PG's express permission.
Yahoo search would be a hell of a lot better if they could just scrape results from Google, but thankfully they lack the misguided sense of entitlement that Padmapper seems to suffer from.
You actually do under the HN terms of use, which are permissive in the licenses they grant regarding HN posts. For example, see HN Magazine and various other HN-based sites and services.
But as you note, the important thing here is the "license." Craigslist offers paid licenses to app develoeprs, which PadMapper chose not to pay for.
> The lawsuit raises questions about who should be able to use the vast amount of user-created data hosted on a site like Craigslist.
No, it really doesn't. This isn't going to be a long, exciting case challenging the underpinnings of copyright law and server terms of services. Padmapper isn't that company.
I can't say that I'm that surprised; Padmapper wrote a whole blog post about how they were adding Craigslist support back to their site after being sent a C&D by Craigslist.
It's a shame for the guy behind Padmapper, but hopefully there'll be a lesson learnt about knowing which fights are worth picking versus knowing when to move on.
Somehow Google managed to overcome Yahoo and Altavista without scraping their data. And look at something like GumTree in the UK, which has always been miles ahead of Craigslist - no first mover advantage taken up there. Plus, GumTree's design has been equally woeful over the years.
uh, didn't he wrote that to say how he was complying with the C&D order and ceasing any automated access to craigslist servers?
padmapper is now merely the user of a 3rd party service that provides craigslist data... it's like coca cola suing me because i bought a can at 7-11 and 7-11 failed to pay the coke distributor.
Speaking of the UK, Foxtons also does a great job providing two interfaces for searching properties (list vs. map view) as well as organizing photos by room with specified dimensions. I wish their design was pretty much applied to Craiglist for property finding in the U.S.
>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data
There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
Because we're also a community of apartment seekers, and Padmapper makes Craigslist's data many times more useful. It's fine if Craigslist wants us to use their mapping service, but it doesn't exist yet. It's a purely selfish argument, but shutting down Padmapper does nothing but make our lives more difficult.
That is hardly shutting down Padmapper. It is just a roadblock and they would have to find another source of data. It has been clear for many years that Craigslist doesn't want their site scraped, so building a business that is so dependent that it would close if they lost that source the business would be ruined is extremely short sighted.
Edit: finished my thought that I left out mid-sentence.
The vast majority of useful data (for the areas that I have looked for apartments, at least) comes from Craigslist. When Padmapper can't use that data, I can't use Padmapper. I'm not talking about the legal, or even ethical aspects of the situation, just the practical ones.
No, it is effectively shutting down Padmapper. Apartment listings are on Craigslist.
As I have said elsewhere, I think Craigslist are within their rights here, but the situation still sucks. People want to browse apartment listings on a map, and Craigslist won't let us.
Are you asking why nobody has made a website that competes directly with Craiglist, but with a better interface? Padmapper allows you to post listing directly, but it's very difficult to get buyers or sellers to bother with a different marketplace when all the other buyers and sellers are already using Craigslist. You can't beat Craigslist on price, and many non-technical people are already comfortable with the existing system. Convincing them to switch to a different marketplace with fewer potential customers and a new interface is very difficult, no matter how great your features are.
Nope, doesn't suck for sellers, at least in seller's markets (SF), they don't have to do anything other than list, and renters will flood in.
Due to various factors (demographics, etc.), sellers also tend to be not the most tech savvy people. I can't believe that it is not standard procedure to post a video walk-through these days. A lot of listings lack even a photo.
I agree! On top of that, the ability to free-ride off of other's data without permission could be seen as an attempt to stiffle innovation as well. Why should I take the time to build something when (a) others can come along and use my data for free and take away my market share or (b) I can just wait a year and scrape the data off of somebody else and not do as much work.
It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
I interpret this different. I certainly think that Craigslist is stifling innovation (perhaps purposefully, perhaps not), but simply stifling innovation is not illegal.
> its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data
Is it Craigslist's data? Does Craigslist own the posts that caused women to be murdered and stolen property to be sold? If they own that data, then they must be culpable (to some degree) for these bad acts.
Craigslit does not claim ownership. Craiglist claims it has a license. They are completely different things. Craiglist is enforcing its license to the post. Ownership of the post itself is, and always has been, with the original poster.
As I see it, they don't own the information, they own the database.
For example, they do not own the fact that you are selling a toothbrush. The do own the records on their servers which catalog the fact that you are selling a toothbrush.
Why? Because they are the ones who went to the trouble of gathering and storing those records.
This is somewhat akin to recording a verbal note from a customer in a book, and storing that book in a giant library. Sure, the user owns the information, but that doesn't mean you are obligated to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry come in and use your library how they see fit- it's your library, even though you do not hold the copyright to all the information stored there.
But if you let anybody use your library, and you don't own the copyright to the content, why are you allowed to stop people from snapping photos of the books and posting them on the web? It's one thing if the copyright holders asked you to, but in this case they want as much distribution as they can get.
Craigslist clearly states that they don't own the data. But just because they don't own it doesn't make it public domain - the ownership belongs to the person who created the listing. To be totally free to repost the data you would need to get explicit permission from each owner.
Of course you're correct, but surely (under the active hypothetical of CL having a license to the users' data) it would fall to the users to sue PadMapper (which they almost surely won't, because they're happy having more interest in their rental).
Google also indexes this data. Craigslist obviously doesn't own this data as they have DMCA practices in place. They can't claim DMCA and also say that the data is their data.
That is a power that, in the past, Craigslist has used for good. In this case, it's a power being used just for the benefit of Craigslist to protect its network effect incumbency, to the detriment of users.
They provide the license to everyone to spread the word that they have apartment for sale by default. It's more resonable to assume that than anything else.
Users are free to post their listings to both Padmapper and Craigslist. Padmapper is not therefore automatically entitled to repurpose Craigslist as a kind of ad-hoc aggregator API for user listings.
I'm also pretty confident that if it was the opposite (PadMapper suing Craigslist for using PadMapper data), then most people would be cheering on PadMapper.
Craiglist provides links to Google and MQ, which is the basis of how the Internet and WWW works. Craiglist supplies the actual address data.
It would be different if Craiglist embedded the maps from GM or MQ, but in such case CL would probably do so with permission from those companies (possibly even--gasp--paying for the right to embed maps).
The point I was making is that CL are increasing the utility of their service by using Google/Yahoo to provide specific maps of property locations. The distinction is that the relevant data curation (property locations) is done by CL, not the mapping providers.
I also noted that API usage would have been paid (or at least licensed), so in that sense, CL are (legitimately) freeloading on Google and Yahoo. While the argument could be made that CL are sending traffic to these sites, that same argument would apply to Padmapper.
Craiglist is being known for not "innovating", at least when it comes to their platform, design etc. Heck, Craig himself said he tries to implement changes as little and as rarely as possible, because he himself does not truly know what makes Craiglist to constantly "tick" year after year.
Im sure that's why their try this lowball trick to defend themselves and show it to judge "hey we want to innovate, and Craiglist does not want to".
The posts on CL are no more "Craigslist data" than videos on YouTube are "Google data". The data is submitted by the users for the express purpose of being seen by other people. Does anyone seriously argue that users listing flats on CL do not want their listing found by other avenues? It is clear that Padmapper is providing a service beneficial to both suppliers and consumers of rental properties, and CL is using the police power of the state to prevent that benefit. Why they're doing this is still a mystery to me.
The users of CL never agreed to let you copy their postings to whatever website you feel like, also it is against their TOS to do so:
Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited. As a limited exception, general purpose Internet search engines and noncommercial public archives will be entitled to access craigslist without individual written agreements executed with CL that specifically authorize an exception to this prohibition if, in all cases and individual instances: (a) they provide a direct hyperlink to the relevant craigslist website, service, forum or content; (b) they access craigslist from a stable IP address using an easily identifiable agent; and (c) they comply with CL's robots.txt file; provided however, that CL may terminate this limited exception as to any search engine or public archive (or any person or entity relying on this provision to access craigslist without their own written agreement executed with CL), at any time and in its sole discretion, upon written notice, including, without limitation, by email notice.
No they don't. They just have to check the stupid checbox that doesn't do anything because otherwise they can't post advertisment they wrote. I'd say cheking this checkbox is coerced. Also you may check it witout reading what's written next to it.
There's also no constitutional right to uninstalling a browser and installing your own browser. That doesn't mean something isn't going wrong with the public's interests.
When a group can interfere with how you hunt for a place to live something is up. Where you live is pretty fundamental.
> When a group can interfere with how you hunt for a place to live something is up.
What entitled bullshit. People/companies do that all the time. Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
Wanting the market to work isn't entitled BS. It's good civic thinking. Craigslist holding onto its incumbency, counter to the interests of the public is entitled BS.
> Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
The first would've been the market working as it should. Also, if Padmapper messes up its UI and goes out of business, then the market works as it should.
Craigslist holding onto its monopoly position is a broken market.
Yes. In as much as Microsoft had "competitors" but had as close to a monopoly position in its market to warrant action.
Pedant posturing aside, to those who have "skin in the game," namely those renting and renting-out property and paying real money for leases, Craigslist is the 800 lb gorilla in most markets.
They have a public interface. I'm using it without agreeing to anything. They can't make me agree by presenting me with checkbox. They can't prevent me from using their interface if I don't agree. On the other hand I can't make them actually publish the information I entered or keep them to their word on anything they declare. It's not what lawers like but that's how internet works.
> Given the emphasis placed on a user’s assent, courts favor finding a binding agreement where the user engages in affirmative conduct acknowledging the terms of a TOS. For instance, a genuine clickwrap agreement, in which a service provider places a TOS just adjacent to or below a click-button (or check-box), has been held to be sufficient to indicate the user agreed to the listed terms. In these cases, requiring the user to click “I Agree,” after calling attention to the terms and affording the user an opportunity to review them, demonstrates the user agreed to the terms. However, courts generally do not require that you actually have read the terms, but just that you had reasonable notice and an opportunity to read them.
Finding myself in american court in the second scenario in the list of preferable scenarios right after finding myself in third world country prison. So if I'm there I consider myself already gone regardless of any argumentation.
In other courts on the other hand in cases about copyright violations even if accuser provided IP address, logs clearly indicating defendants computer the case was dismissed because he still failed to indicate that it was in fact the defendant that downloaded and/or served the copyrighted file in question.
I'd say same way there's no possibility anyone could prove that it was I who checked the checkbox.
What does that have to do anything? The point is that users do not care if other companies copy their listing data (and aren't even aware of such a restriction).
How have you determined that every users listing on Padmapper doesn't care it has been scraped from CL and relisted? Did they contact every user and get their permission first?
The notion that I am bound by whatever legalese someone happens to put on their publicly accessible website is absurd in the extreme; I am not the one checking the box to submit a post. CL is perfectly able to restrict read-access to those who agree to the terms, e.g., by requiring registration. That they choose not to is their choice, and the state should not be used as a substitute bludgeon whenever they dislike the unintended consequences.
Furthermore, the publicly-accessible data isn't being copied, it's being consumed. I may consume the data to find an apartment. Someone might consume the data to calculate the average market prices in a city. Padmapper consumes the data to generate locations on a map.
This makes no sense. You agree to the TOS when you post information to CL, not when you are just browsing for listings; that submitted information is what is bound by the TOS above. Also if you aren't the one checking the agree box, who is?
From what you've written above it sounds like you believe any contract between two parties is absurd in the extreme.
Imagine that Padmapper were released as an alternative web browser. As an end user, I have the right to consume CL's content. Do they have a right to tell me which web browser I can and cannot use?
Since CL offers their data freely to "the public", by what theory can they prevent the public from using their own chosen client browser to view it? Why should there be a distinction between software installed in my computer and a cloud-hosted application like Padmapper?
I believe that Padmapper, as an agent acting on behalf of its users, has every right to reformat the information originating on CL as long as it does not purposefully seek to cause confusion about the origin of the data (which they do not as they link to the source).
Even if you go with the "it's not their data" argument Craigslist would seem to own the specific compilation of the data. I'd apply the same copyright principle as phone books or encyclopedias.
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a compilation work such as a database must contain a minimum level of creativity in order to be protectable under the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court (...) held that Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright protection, since the white pages did not meet the statutory requirement for originality under 17 U.S.C. §102(a).
Cragslist is completely automated. There's absolutely no creativity involved.
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
Unfortunately for them, "sweat of the brow" doesn't afford copyright protection in the US.
>Cragslist is completely automated. There's absolutely no creativity involved.
Whoa whoa whoa, the coding of the site didn't involve a species of creativity?
If you mean that the content of a posting didn't involve creativity on Craigslist's part, you'd be on firmer ground, but even there they made design decisions (however questionable...) about how to present it.
I don't really have a horse in the PadMapper/Craigslist debate but your analogy to YouTube is apt. I have a bunch of videos uploaded to YouTube, and I've permitted embedding because I know that even if a video is embedded somewhere I can still remove the video from my YouTube Channel Manager.
When I upload a video to YouTube, I do expect to retain control of it solely through my interactions with YouTube, and expect that when I take it down it gets taken down across all Google properties. I would be pretty angry if I found that my videos were on another site which had scraped YouTube's data and now was hosting my video without any ability for me to remove it.
Stifling or not stifling, it's always a huge risk to build your business around someone else's technology, especially one that has a track record of not cooperating with third parties.
Actually, that's on a legal copyright data -- the expression of the information belongs to its author.
The facts themselves aren't subject to copyright.
Access through the CL site is governed by various computer use statutes. Though aggregation-via-proxy as PM are doing through Google cache raises some interesting issues.
> I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
Well, for one thing: different ideas about what constitutes fair game for property/control claims.
Not everything can be copyrighted or patented, and specifically, it's really not clear that a rental/for sale/wanted listing is actually a copyrightable work.
If that weren't enough, though, there's also not really a clear difference between what Padmapper does and a search engine -- it doesn't "steal" listings and put them wholesale on their site without attribution, it provides a geographic search that yields a limited digest and then points users to the original source.
"unlawfully and unabashedly mass-harvesting and redistributing postings entrusted by craigslist users to their local craigslist sites"
Boo on Craigslist! They claim that they're protecting their users, but what harm is padmapper causing to people listing properties on Craigslist? Getting them more potential renters?
What's it like to work as Craigslist and read this stuff? How could you be excited to come to work every day knowing that network effects have carved a deep moat around a site that people describe as "an exercise in torture"?
Commenters here make this sound like an open and shut case in favor of Craigslist. IANAL, so could someone explain why Google's index of material covered by copyright is ok and PadMapper's is not?
Most likely because Google aren't using their service to compete with, e.g., Craigslist. I also imagine that if you ask Google (especially with a C&D), they'll be more than happy to remove you from their index.
Because if you ask Google to remove you from their index, they will.
Rupert Murdoch has threatened this in the past. Each time he's backed down, because he knows that being removed from Google's index is akin to being removed from the Internet.
Craigslist doesn't needs to be removed from the search index. They just need to prevent caching of posts, which is what 3Taps was abusing. Noarchive in robots.txt ought to take care of that.
Which shows just how much Google profits from their virtual monopoly. If content companies knew that Google would make billions of dollars selling advertisement based on the content that they generated, it would be very hard for Google to pull the massive Internet scrapping that they managed to do from day one. It is interesting that people understand the illegitimacy of taking data from a single content source (Craigslist), but fail to see how unethical is to take data from everyone and sell advertisements based on that.
Aren't they only disallowing particular pages there? Like apartments are at *.craigslist.org/apa/number.html which doesn't seem blocked by that robots.txt.
I can imagine some clever hacks where Padmapper uses Google targeted searches and Google's cache exclusively to get Craigslist data. Since Craigslist would never ask Google to remove them from their index, I wonder if Craigslist would still go after those who get their data as proxied by Google.
I was always wondering that. In essence, both cases appropriate CL's data for the users benefit, and both tend to send traffic back. I'm currently in a similar situation, where I have to ask myself how much i can scrape/aggregate/visualize 3rd party data that is useful to an user while stil providing value to the 3rd party.
I believe ultimately, it is at the 3rd partys (in this case Craigslist) discretion who is allowed to appropriate their data and who not.
Because you specifically grant access to your content using the robots.txt. If you don't want to have your site indexed, then you change your robots.txt. Or like it was said before, you ask Google to remove you from the index.
[Law student here, but I don't know the full details of the claim CL is making]
The case doesn't actually seem open and shut at all. CL seems to have a "moral high ground" in that they provide the original service and the platform for users to post information, but the legal ground is more shaky. It is relatively settled in copyright law (which appears to be the main thrust of CL's argument) that effort alone does not award copyright protection[1] (or indeed, any property rights in general[2]).
For example, phone listings are not copyrightable, nor is news. The general question is whether there was creative expression (which can include 'creative' presentation or organization). If I were Padmapper, I would argue that classified listings are just a collection of facts, in which case they are not copyrightable. Padmapper does not actually use the listings directly, but extracts the information and puts it in a different format (their interface). On this point I think their case is relatively strong.
Where CL might be able to make a better case is their TOU. The TOU forms a contract between CL and their users. In almost all such prominent cases, this type of contract has been found to be enforceable[3]. If this line of reasoning is followed, then Padmapper will probably lose on this point because they agreed not to "copy, aggregate, distribute", etc.[4]
If this is a contractual claim the damages would be what CL could have expected if Padmapper had not 'breached' the contract - in this case I'm not sure that amount is particularly large, because Padmapper redirects to CL's site for the actual listings.
TLDR: copyright claim seems weak, but the contractual claim might succeed. The trademark stuff seems like a red herring and is CL throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
[EDIT: see below, I overlooked the fact that Padmapper is no longer using CL data directly, so they might not be bound by the TOU at all. Same goes for 3Taps since they use Google's cache. Looking stronger for Padmapper]
In the meantime, CL might be able to get an injunction to stop Padmapper from using their listings, and that itself might be what they're after until a settlement is reached.
Is it clear that Padmapper is bound by the TOU of CL? Padmapper probably has a contractual relationship with 3Taps, and Google probably has a contractual relationship with CL. I'm not sure 3Taps has entered into a contractual relationship with Google by scraping their cache, but even if they did, what is the legal agreement between CL and Padmapper?
Hmm that is a good question, which I didn't consider. What I said would have applied to the original method that Padmapper used to scrape data directly from Craigslist but probably not under the new arrangement through 3Taps. Probably nobody is bound by the TOU except Google, and unless Google has a collateral contract (TOU) with 3Taps and/or Padmapper there probably isn't a claim at all. Good catch.
I don't know if it's open and shut either - but not because of the search analogy. That's covered in the CL ToS, sections 3 and 5. (http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use)
My problem is with section 3. CONTENT AND CONDUCT, part a, where they first state "CL does not control, is not responsible for and makes no representations or warranties with respect to any user content." Then it goes on to state that posters assign a bevy of licensing rights to CL for the use of the content.
How can they claim copyright to content and at the same time aver that they don't control it?
This is where the lawsuit gets _legally_ interesting. Craigslist can't really claim copyright over the listings themselves (see post above), but they can certainly restrict user rights through their terms of use (which is a contract). Generally, contracts can be used to reduce a set of rights a person has against another (e.g. waivers), but it cannot grant rights that they did not have in the first place.
So the first part of that statement is akin to waiver, so that someone can't sue CL for what the listings say. The second part is a claim on copyright and licensing, which they may or may not have.
"(Craigslist) said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."
I don't know the legal merits of either party's position, but from an ethical perspective, I tend to side with Craigslist here. Dissatisfaction with a commercial site's UI is not just cause for using their data without permission, particularly if they had made an effort to offer a licensing agreement, whatever the terms might have been.
I see this from the opposite viewpoint, that PadMapper is operating as a search engine designed to help you find the right Craigslist posts for your apartment hunt. Claiming that PadMapper's success is from Craigslist failing to 'provide a good UI' is like suggesting that Google News' success is because newspaper companies failed to provide good article SEO. Instead, it's a different modality of content discovery, and it ultimately redirects you to the original source.
In my (personal) opinion, I would argue that the content providers or aggregators and search engines benefit synergistically. CL and Belgian newspapers appear to disagree.
Here's the abstract for a nice review of search engine law: http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/13/ If I remember correctly, indexing a site that asks to not be indexed might be illegal as an illegal tresspass, but it is not settled law. The argument is that you are stealing resources (computer time) from the site owner.
There are a lot of companies that are scraping Google quite successfully. Many of these are for 'rank checking' services that provide ranking data for certain keywords over time; these are heavily used by SEO and marketing agencies.
The two that jump to mind are Authority Labs and SEOmoz.
IANAL but AFAIK it is only a civil matter (i.e. not illegal) since it is a usually prosecuted as a tort of trespass to chattels. For such a case to succeed the prosecution needs to show that the actions of the defendant deprived them of use of the good they were trespassing on. i.e. they need to cause enough of a burden on the servers that the claimant or their customers could not use the service.
What I'd care more about is whether the people posting the ads wish to be indexed; I'd be surprised if many don't. (I don't know about the legal bearing either.)
Perhaps craigslist could put up a checkbox (like they do with the never-checked "It's okay to contact me about products ...") that says something like:
"I'm okay with people finding this listing through another service."
Perhaps because they don't want people to get to their listings that way even if they want to, and thus don't want your opinion? (Edit: and perhaps they really aren't as interested as they claim in making it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other?)
This type of comment is common. Not only on HN but on forums in general.
While I agree the web is full of lowlifes engaged in web development, many of them in porn or some other area that appeals to base instincts, I find this comment perplexing. Because it is so subjective, yet it tries to seem objective by focusing on some random criteria.
Google employs a "bot army" to scrape the entire web. So what?
If the comment was something like "I don't like Company X." Or even "I don't like Company X because...", it would make sense to me.
But that is not how this common type of comment goes. Instead it suggests that bot=evil, i.e. any sort of automation or any sort of data collection by anyone other than [your favorite company] is "shady".
That's crazy. IMO.
It's what a company does with the data that matters.
Anyway, I'm not keen on 3Taps because they are not provinding bulk data, only API's that require "developer keys". Why?
Either you are going to democratise data, or you are just another schemer trying to find ways to collect infromation about people, in this case people using "your API".
I don't want API's I want the data. I can make my own interfaces thank you.
I thought it was weird that CL didn't add a Disallow line for padmapper to robots.txt from the start (just from a PR perspective).
But robots.txt has no special legal authority, it's just a convention used to communicate a publisher's intent. I'm pretty sure the C&D letter made it 100% clear that CL did not want Padmapper crawling their site or using their data.
I know, but I thought the existence of robots.txt was why Google is allowed to crawl sites. If a site disagrees with the crawling they can add a robots.txt entry and Google will honor it. It at least shows that you are giving the publisher an option.
For that analogy to hold, PadMapper would have to be pulling data from a large number of sources. The value that Google News provides is that it aggregates a very large number of sources. PadMapper does not.
It's pretty clear PadMapper was BUILT off of Craigslist that CL's poor UI is isn't entire reason for being, and it never would have been successful without CL. It's disingenuous to ignore that by listing "rent.com" as an alternate source.
In my city, Craigslist is hardly used for rental listings. Everybody uses kijiji.com, which is available on Padmapper. There are alternative data sources, and they are actually used. Just not where you are.
But that is where the source of the problem is - CL has the largest user base for listing and classifieds on the internet and since they have the monopoly on this they have never felt the need to improve the experience on their site. Now that padmapper has started getting large number of users CL feels threatened and is suing them to shut them down.
I don't like Craigslist because of lock in. Sellers must sell there because they are the biggest market, buyers must buy there because they are the biggest market. Everyone is locked in.
Lock-in is super common(and often unintentional or unavoidable), but it goes against the ideal of equal opportunity and competitive markets that rewards companies for a continuous commitment to quality and innovation.
I feel that craigslist has done nothing wrong except for standing in the doorway when other people who want to innovate and improve things are trying to get through (like PadMapper).
True, but it's also very easy as a buyer (or seller) to use more than one site. Nothing about Craigslist is exclusive and in that sense the lock-in is very weak.
A Craigslist competitor doesn't need a huge market share to be viable. For me as a seller, it just has to expand my audience of buyers enough to justify the small amount of time it takes to post and manage a second listing.
The reason why Craigslist is valuable is because of it's large network. It is obvious that smaller sites like PadMapper want to slowly try and chip away at Craiglist content (see PadLister) after they hopefully gain enough traction to supplant them. Padmapper / Padlister are fine to start their own sites and have users come and post their listings there, but not to copy content from Craigslist after they specifically asked them to stop.
> It is obvious that smaller sites like PadMapper want to slowly try and chip away at Craiglist content
It's not Craigslist's content. It's our content, the general public's. Craigslist is just a caretaker. Right now, it's a caretaker acting in its own interests against the public's.
The general public gave it to Craigslist under readily available terms. The general public is free to also give it to your service, but that's up to them.
This is disingenuous. Craigslist isn't doing the public's will. It's just taking advantage of public apathy. (Much like Microsoft did with the browser wars.)
Yes you did post some facts about your listing to CL, it is also well within Craigslists right to allow others to copy it or not. Just because you supplied the data to CL doesn't mean you can dictate to them how they should run their business.
A copyright clause designed to allow Craigslist to stop abuse shouldn't be used to squash competitors. That's not dictating "how they should run their business." That's telling them to stop being selfish.
Again, disingenuous. CL has the network effect. That's like Microsoft saying, Users are free to install their own browsers. Their current actions are only to preserve that, not to squash abuses. (Which is what they usually do with the power of their TOU.)
Apple's network effect or market position clearly doesn't make other phones and devices a non-starter. Craiglist's network effect and market position clearly makes other housing listing sites a non-starter.
It also does not mean that CL has any obligation to provide that data to another for free. If you want the data in multiple locations, post it to those other locations.
The purpose of CL is to provide data for free. Why should they care how that data is packaged, so long as this packaging is not abusive, but actually beneficial?
The real reason: Craigslist wants to hold onto their monopoly position.
The license offered by craigslist was for a mobile application only. There was nothing offered for websites. You can see this as either, 'license offered with terms' or 'no license offered at all'
How do people not see this for exactly what it is: The same situation as we are finding with cable providers not wanting to be dumb pipes. The only difference is people don't pay money to CL. They just give CL all their information, and CL decides what to do with it.
Craigslist has no divine right to its users' information; it just happens to be the only viable option. If Craigslist didn't exist, someone else would, and would probably do it better.
If Craigslist wants to continue existing, they should take advantage of the fact that they are the go-to for online classifieds, create a modest subscription-based API and let the information flow.
The problem is that Craigslist has a monopoly. They use that monopoly to shut down competitors, resulting in millions of hours of lost time for users every month.
The relevant part of the act would be: "Intentionally accessing a computer without authorization to obtain ... information from any protected computer". A "protected computer" is a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication", which fits Craisglist pretty well.
Violation of the clause I quoted is a criminal offense with potential jail time.
That clause could be construed in any number of ways. Anyone accessing a web page could be liable if they have not 'obtained authorization' from the site owner.
How does this differ from Readability or Instapaper stripping advertisements away and serving users pure content in their respective interfaces? I'm not sure what they're doing is illegal.
Readability is just client-side code. Think of it as just a different implementation of a browser that ignores some markup and renders some markup in a non-standard way.
There's no doubting the legality of Padmapper scraping Craigslist data, so I think now would be a good time for him to innovate and really push his other product, PadLister. If Eric were to write another blog post, I'd make PadLister the focus of it and start building a new community there.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadCraigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it. The alternatives somehow manage to be even more spectacularly useless by over-designing their apps and cluttering them up with junk.
Padmapper is one of the few that does what they're supposed to do, and it's not even an optimal implementation of this sort of thing.
Padmapper is (indirectly) screen-scraping Craigslist's data in an attempt to unseat Craigslist.
Unseat Craigslist as the undisputed champion of what, exactly? Cartographical apartment hunting?
Craigslist didn't write a single one of those posts. They try and assert control over this content through their terms of service:
"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."
The last part of that may not be enforceable. They're asserting that they are singularly responsible for "authorizing" reproduction despite not having copyright for the material in question.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/righthaven-copyri...
Craiglist does have a copyright use license, and thus has the right to enforce the license it has been granted.
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.
It's a difficult nut to crack. Kajiji seems to be gaining some traction, but it's trading one set of UX nightmares for another.
Craigslist controls a two-sided market. If I build a new site, I can't get buyers without there already being sellers. And vice-versa. That's an incredibly difficult business problem.
Github seems to have had it easier. I can just host my new project on github and be done with it (my website links to it after all). I'm sure sourceforge had some value just by being the go-to place, but how strong was the network effect from a developer perspective?
SourceForge and its related properties were the backbone of the early web, supporting a number of important efforts to which people felt a strong allegiance. It was like a benevolent force at the time.
SourceForge had, at the time, a fairly formal process for registration. They considered themselves more like a library where getting shelf space was a privilege not doled out lightly. This is not unlike how getting into the Yahoo! directory required a lot of begging and pleading.
While this meant that most of the projects hosted by it had a lot of merit, those lesser efforts were left out in the cold. They failed to switch to a more casual model as the "Web 2.0" philosophy started being the dominant mind-set, where expectations shifted dramatically from carefully curated content to emergent user-driven communities.
Also worth noting, GitHub's pace of innovation is so far beyond nearly anything else in the industry that it was only a matter of time before they became the superior platform in terms of technology.
Additionally they were able to ride the surge of popularity that git was gaining, something that SourceForge didn't support at the time, and persuaded a number of high-profile projects to move to them. The real coup was Ruby on Rails, which once hosted there, solidified their position.
Any Craiglist displacer would need to swing a few important, strategic deals to cement it in the minds of people as a reasonable alternative. The rest would be a case of just driving harder than Craiglist is willing to keep up with.
If a lot of people INSIST on using it, then that means it has good UX. Complaints with their UX should be qualified.
For instance, many payroll companies have truly awful sites, yet people use them since they have no other choice.
As a specific example, searching for an apartment should not mean reading every single listing in order to discern where the property is, what features are available, and what conditions apply. That people post the same listing repeatedly until it is rented is not helping matters.
eBay, which is arguably still quite primitive, has much better filtering options, alerts, and a single listing that persists until the auction is completed. Craiglist is a series of random, repetitive posts with only a minimum of categorization.
Padmapper provided a superior way to navigate listing data and present it in a much more meaningful presentation. Being able to "favorite" listings helps when filtering.
Also, don't confuse my opinions about Craigslist's design/UX with an opinion on the case. I've used Padmapper extensively. While I believe that Craigslist has a right to do what they please with their content, I don't see what Padmapper was doing as wholly legally wrong.
It may look butt ugly, but it is as close to a functionally efficient classifieds board as you can get. Craigslist isn't trying to be anything more than that.
This doesn't mean that PadMapper is right, from a legal standpoint, but I think it's fair to say that craigslist's UX is terrible, for apartment/house searches (where small variations in location matter a LOT) at least.
Please use the proper legal word - "Monopoly". I wonder how the Department of Justice decides who to prosecute?
But craiggers provides a very valuable service, namely showing pictures of items as you search. It made furniture searching so much easier.
I have zero sympathy for craigslist. They didn't get into their position through "years of hard work". They won the lottery (someone had to win it). They have done zero innovation (other than maybe anti-spam) for years and prevent others from innovating on top. Society wins if they are forced to open their data.
Name one startup that began knowing they were going to be sued and went on to a successful exit.
Parenthetically, the original Napster, the one that began knowing it would be sued, was sold about 3 years after its founding for less than $2.5 million as part of bankruptcy proceedings -- and I doubt that the owners took any significant dividends out of its before its sale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster#Current_status
Some do it to prove a point, some do it to prove that the market exists.
"The company said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
From the original: > They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites.
"Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
Usually, when companies get mad about scraping, it's because it's either bypassing the ads that make them money, or in rare cases bypassing a premium API. Here, PadMapper is doing neither.
In fact, if Craiglist is so committed to not updating their ugly website, why don't they just license out a public API, killing two birds (new monetization strategy and having a better interface for free) with one stone?
Though to be honest that makes no sense, because that's exactly what they're getting from the third party site, and they're paying for that...
Edit: Not sure why this comment is getting down-voted, but if I offended some one that was not my intention.
PadMapper is basically a pointer to a listing on Craigslist (when Craigslist listings are the reference), where you can search the pointers with filtering that you can't on Craigslist. In order to get to PadMapper, you have to visit the site directly.
Once you have a web site that attracts buyers, you can replace craigslist data with your own listing service and stop paying for their API.
They clearly don't fear this kind of competition in the mobile space, hence offering licenses for mobile-only API use.
The point is that simply defending against the lawsuit could kill Padmapper. Lots of time, money, and energy go into lawsuits. Conveniently, those are three things startups don't typically have in excess. The outcome doesn't matter for Padmapper if Padmapper dies during the defense.
If you're going to downvote me, that's fine, but if you do, please show how copyright infringement does not fit within the definition of stealing. I'd like to settle this semantic debate once and for all.
or are you going to say it's fair use?
i for one advertised places in craigslist and search for places on padmapper. I loved that my listing showed up for free and without me moving a finger on padmapper, and i found it much bette to find a place using padmapper's interface.
now, posting on craigslist has lost value for me. as my post will not be on that nice interface for people to find.
So, as far as you may prove they are stealing craigslist data, they sure as hell are not 'stealing' my data that i post at craigslist.
So, i don't think it fits the last word of your stolen definition "make use of wrongfully".
edit: Ok, I won't be so cryptic. Padmapper doesn't copy the posts on Craigslist, they link to them. That's not a semantic quibble. All search engines do so. If I blogged that I was renting my apartment and linked to the Craigslist post describing it, I would be doing exactly what Padmapper is doing.
However,
If I blogged that I was renting my apartment and linked to the Craigslist post describing it, I would be doing exactly what Padmapper is doing.
This doesn't line up in a few ways. Padmapper is a third-party, not the original poster. There is also a distinction between doing it as a one-off and doing it in an automated fashion.
Padmapper needs to make it trivial for people to "upload" their listings from CL to PM. It could be a single bookmarklet.
Now, suppose that Alice tells Padmapper about Bob's apartment for rent on CL. That's getting even weirder, but PM might be okay if they follow DMCA safe harbour procedures.
It doesn't seem, however, that the link is the crux of CL's complaint. Rather it's the fact that PM has copied CL's data in order to generate a mapping of physical locations to CL listings.
Padmapper does link to images, but Padmapper would be useless if it didn't also re-publish the content jacked from Craigslist.
That was my main point; it's fairly useless for non-attorneys to argue legal cases on HN (my apologies if you're a lawyer and I'm just wasting your time).
AFAICT, Padmapper is doing something very much in line with what journalists and search engines have traditionally done. That point of view may not prevail in court, but I think it's completely defensible on ethical grounds.
Also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nz/arguing_by_definition/
So the dictionary agrees with the common use of steal in the realm of intellectual property. It's really the proponents of copyright violation who have redefined stealing to exclude copyrighted digital media.
The people who will whip out dictionaries over "steal" are crudely trying to inject an emotional response into the debate and trying to override rational discourse with rhetoric.
The people who are constantly whipping out "you still have it" are naively pretending that, just because it doesn't fit within all the criteria of physical theft, it also means that the other moral concerns associated with it are equally moot.
tl;dr: Both sides of the "stealing!" debate are being incredibly disingenuous.
Eric, everybody saw this coming.
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.
If you build it, doesn't automatically mean that they will come.
This is not to address the issue of ownership of listing data, or the case law, which latter isn't settled anyway.
Yahoo search would be a hell of a lot better if they could just scrape results from Google, but thankfully they lack the misguided sense of entitlement that Padmapper seems to suffer from.
But as you note, the important thing here is the "license." Craigslist offers paid licenses to app develoeprs, which PadMapper chose not to pay for.
No, it really doesn't. This isn't going to be a long, exciting case challenging the underpinnings of copyright law and server terms of services. Padmapper isn't that company.
It's a shame for the guy behind Padmapper, but hopefully there'll be a lesson learnt about knowing which fights are worth picking versus knowing when to move on.
Somehow Google managed to overcome Yahoo and Altavista without scraping their data. And look at something like GumTree in the UK, which has always been miles ahead of Craigslist - no first mover advantage taken up there. Plus, GumTree's design has been equally woeful over the years.
padmapper is now merely the user of a 3rd party service that provides craigslist data... it's like coca cola suing me because i bought a can at 7-11 and 7-11 failed to pay the coke distributor.
>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data
There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
Edit: finished my thought that I left out mid-sentence.
As I have said elsewhere, I think Craigslist are within their rights here, but the situation still sucks. People want to browse apartment listings on a map, and Craigslist won't let us.
Does it suck for people on the other end - people with a property that they'd like to rent to others?
Why hasn't some other solution come onto the market to fix the problems of craigslist?
Are you asking why nobody has made a website that competes directly with Craiglist, but with a better interface? Padmapper allows you to post listing directly, but it's very difficult to get buyers or sellers to bother with a different marketplace when all the other buyers and sellers are already using Craigslist. You can't beat Craigslist on price, and many non-technical people are already comfortable with the existing system. Convincing them to switch to a different marketplace with fewer potential customers and a new interface is very difficult, no matter how great your features are.
Due to various factors (demographics, etc.), sellers also tend to be not the most tech savvy people. I can't believe that it is not standard procedure to post a video walk-through these days. A lot of listings lack even a photo.
Monopoly power.
It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
Is it Craigslist's data? Does Craigslist own the posts that caused women to be murdered and stolen property to be sold? If they own that data, then they must be culpable (to some degree) for these bad acts.
If they own it, they are now more than just a service provider (IMO) and can no longer be protected by the DCA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
For example, they do not own the fact that you are selling a toothbrush. The do own the records on their servers which catalog the fact that you are selling a toothbrush.
Why? Because they are the ones who went to the trouble of gathering and storing those records.
This is somewhat akin to recording a verbal note from a customer in a book, and storing that book in a giant library. Sure, the user owns the information, but that doesn't mean you are obligated to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry come in and use your library how they see fit- it's your library, even though you do not hold the copyright to all the information stored there.
/pedant
Note that these are free links, not paid-for API calls.
Who's free-riding whom?
It would be different if Craiglist embedded the maps from GM or MQ, but in such case CL would probably do so with permission from those companies (possibly even--gasp--paying for the right to embed maps).
I also noted that API usage would have been paid (or at least licensed), so in that sense, CL are (legitimately) freeloading on Google and Yahoo. While the argument could be made that CL are sending traffic to these sites, that same argument would apply to Padmapper.
Im sure that's why their try this lowball trick to defend themselves and show it to judge "hey we want to innovate, and Craiglist does not want to".
But sure its not their business what CL does...
Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited. As a limited exception, general purpose Internet search engines and noncommercial public archives will be entitled to access craigslist without individual written agreements executed with CL that specifically authorize an exception to this prohibition if, in all cases and individual instances: (a) they provide a direct hyperlink to the relevant craigslist website, service, forum or content; (b) they access craigslist from a stable IP address using an easily identifiable agent; and (c) they comply with CL's robots.txt file; provided however, that CL may terminate this limited exception as to any search engine or public archive (or any person or entity relying on this provision to access craigslist without their own written agreement executed with CL), at any time and in its sole discretion, upon written notice, including, without limitation, by email notice.
When a group can interfere with how you hunt for a place to live something is up. Where you live is pretty fundamental.
What entitled bullshit. People/companies do that all the time. Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
Wanting the market to work isn't entitled BS. It's good civic thinking. Craigslist holding onto its incumbency, counter to the interests of the public is entitled BS.
> Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?
The first would've been the market working as it should. Also, if Padmapper messes up its UI and goes out of business, then the market works as it should.
Craigslist holding onto its monopoly position is a broken market.
This sounds more like whining than anything based in reality. Craigslist has a monopoly on apartment rent listings?
http://www.apartments.com/
http://www.apartmentguide.com/
http://www.zillow.com
http://www.apartmentfinder.com/
http://www.forrent.com/
http://www.apartmentsearch.com/
http://www.rent.com/
http://www.apartmentratings.com/
http://www.rentals.com/Apartments/
Pedant posturing aside, to those who have "skin in the game," namely those renting and renting-out property and paying real money for leases, Craigslist is the 800 lb gorilla in most markets.
False. From the EFF: https://www.eff.org/wp/clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-t...
> Given the emphasis placed on a user’s assent, courts favor finding a binding agreement where the user engages in affirmative conduct acknowledging the terms of a TOS. For instance, a genuine clickwrap agreement, in which a service provider places a TOS just adjacent to or below a click-button (or check-box), has been held to be sufficient to indicate the user agreed to the listed terms. In these cases, requiring the user to click “I Agree,” after calling attention to the terms and affording the user an opportunity to review them, demonstrates the user agreed to the terms. However, courts generally do not require that you actually have read the terms, but just that you had reasonable notice and an opportunity to read them.
In other courts on the other hand in cases about copyright violations even if accuser provided IP address, logs clearly indicating defendants computer the case was dismissed because he still failed to indicate that it was in fact the defendant that downloaded and/or served the copyrighted file in question.
I'd say same way there's no possibility anyone could prove that it was I who checked the checkbox.
But please ignore me. I'm just venting.
But like padmapper, you would be completely screwed if it turned into a lawsuit.
Furthermore, the publicly-accessible data isn't being copied, it's being consumed. I may consume the data to find an apartment. Someone might consume the data to calculate the average market prices in a city. Padmapper consumes the data to generate locations on a map.
From what you've written above it sounds like you believe any contract between two parties is absurd in the extreme.
Well, if nothing else, the submitting users' copyright applies. CL has a license to use it however they like, you don't.
Since CL offers their data freely to "the public", by what theory can they prevent the public from using their own chosen client browser to view it? Why should there be a distinction between software installed in my computer and a cloud-hosted application like Padmapper?
I believe that Padmapper, as an agent acting on behalf of its users, has every right to reformat the information originating on CL as long as it does not purposefully seek to cause confusion about the origin of the data (which they do not as they link to the source).
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a compilation work such as a database must contain a minimum level of creativity in order to be protectable under the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court (...) held that Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright protection, since the white pages did not meet the statutory requirement for originality under 17 U.S.C. §102(a).
Cragslist is completely automated. There's absolutely no creativity involved.
Craigslist invested in the infrastructure to enter, store, and display this information. They should be able to set their terms as to how it is used in aggregate.
Unfortunately for them, "sweat of the brow" doesn't afford copyright protection in the US.
Whoa whoa whoa, the coding of the site didn't involve a species of creativity?
If you mean that the content of a posting didn't involve creativity on Craigslist's part, you'd be on firmer ground, but even there they made design decisions (however questionable...) about how to present it.
The design decision are irrelevant, since Padmapper isn't copying those.
So would I—phone books are not subject to compilation copyright, because there's no editorial choice going on. That was settled in the _Feist_ case.
When I upload a video to YouTube, I do expect to retain control of it solely through my interactions with YouTube, and expect that when I take it down it gets taken down across all Google properties. I would be pretty angry if I found that my videos were on another site which had scraped YouTube's data and now was hosting my video without any ability for me to remove it.
The facts themselves aren't subject to copyright.
Access through the CL site is governed by various computer use statutes. Though aggregation-via-proxy as PM are doing through Google cache raises some interesting issues.
Well, for one thing: different ideas about what constitutes fair game for property/control claims.
Not everything can be copyrighted or patented, and specifically, it's really not clear that a rental/for sale/wanted listing is actually a copyrightable work.
If that weren't enough, though, there's also not really a clear difference between what Padmapper does and a search engine -- it doesn't "steal" listings and put them wholesale on their site without attribution, it provides a geographic search that yields a limited digest and then points users to the original source.
Boo on Craigslist! They claim that they're protecting their users, but what harm is padmapper causing to people listing properties on Craigslist? Getting them more potential renters?
Rupert Murdoch has threatened this in the past. Each time he's backed down, because he knows that being removed from Google's index is akin to being removed from the Internet.
http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt
edit: oops! they're not actually blocking google from the apartment listings. thanks smackfu.
That's what Padmapper is doing right now. They're being sued for it.
It's not a new thing for a start-up to use Craigslist to gain an advantage (i.e. AirBnB), but they all seem to eventually be cut-off.
I believe ultimately, it is at the 3rd partys (in this case Craigslist) discretion who is allowed to appropriate their data and who not.
The case doesn't actually seem open and shut at all. CL seems to have a "moral high ground" in that they provide the original service and the platform for users to post information, but the legal ground is more shaky. It is relatively settled in copyright law (which appears to be the main thrust of CL's argument) that effort alone does not award copyright protection[1] (or indeed, any property rights in general[2]).
For example, phone listings are not copyrightable, nor is news. The general question is whether there was creative expression (which can include 'creative' presentation or organization). If I were Padmapper, I would argue that classified listings are just a collection of facts, in which case they are not copyrightable. Padmapper does not actually use the listings directly, but extracts the information and puts it in a different format (their interface). On this point I think their case is relatively strong.
Where CL might be able to make a better case is their TOU. The TOU forms a contract between CL and their users. In almost all such prominent cases, this type of contract has been found to be enforceable[3]. If this line of reasoning is followed, then Padmapper will probably lose on this point because they agreed not to "copy, aggregate, distribute", etc.[4]
If this is a contractual claim the damages would be what CL could have expected if Padmapper had not 'breached' the contract - in this case I'm not sure that amount is particularly large, because Padmapper redirects to CL's site for the actual listings.
TLDR: copyright claim seems weak, but the contractual claim might succeed. The trademark stuff seems like a red herring and is CL throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
[EDIT: see below, I overlooked the fact that Padmapper is no longer using CL data directly, so they might not be bound by the TOU at all. Same goes for 3Taps since they use Google's cache. Looking stronger for Padmapper]
[1] Feist v. Rural, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
[2] INS v. AP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._A...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap
[4] CL Terms of Use (see section 3), http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use
My problem is with section 3. CONTENT AND CONDUCT, part a, where they first state "CL does not control, is not responsible for and makes no representations or warranties with respect to any user content." Then it goes on to state that posters assign a bevy of licensing rights to CL for the use of the content.
How can they claim copyright to content and at the same time aver that they don't control it?
So the first part of that statement is akin to waiver, so that someone can't sue CL for what the listings say. The second part is a claim on copyright and licensing, which they may or may not have.
But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."
I don't know the legal merits of either party's position, but from an ethical perspective, I tend to side with Craigslist here. Dissatisfaction with a commercial site's UI is not just cause for using their data without permission, particularly if they had made an effort to offer a licensing agreement, whatever the terms might have been.
In my (personal) opinion, I would argue that the content providers or aggregators and search engines benefit synergistically. CL and Belgian newspapers appear to disagree.
That's why 3taps is getting the data from google's cache without touching craigslist servers.
The two that jump to mind are Authority Labs and SEOmoz.
I guess: a shed load of proxies. :)
"I'm okay with people finding this listing through another service."
Perhaps because they don't want people to get to their listings that way even if they want to, and thus don't want your opinion? (Edit: and perhaps they really aren't as interested as they claim in making it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other?)
So, yes.
[edit for clarity, and for misspelling clarity]
While I agree the web is full of lowlifes engaged in web development, many of them in porn or some other area that appeals to base instincts, I find this comment perplexing. Because it is so subjective, yet it tries to seem objective by focusing on some random criteria.
Google employs a "bot army" to scrape the entire web. So what?
If the comment was something like "I don't like Company X." Or even "I don't like Company X because...", it would make sense to me.
But that is not how this common type of comment goes. Instead it suggests that bot=evil, i.e. any sort of automation or any sort of data collection by anyone other than [your favorite company] is "shady".
That's crazy. IMO.
It's what a company does with the data that matters.
Anyway, I'm not keen on 3Taps because they are not provinding bulk data, only API's that require "developer keys". Why?
Either you are going to democratise data, or you are just another schemer trying to find ways to collect infromation about people, in this case people using "your API".
I don't want API's I want the data. I can make my own interfaces thank you.
But robots.txt has no special legal authority, it's just a convention used to communicate a publisher's intent. I'm pretty sure the C&D letter made it 100% clear that CL did not want Padmapper crawling their site or using their data.
It does.
Look, it's obvious that even PadMapper believes Craigslist is THE data source they must have.
Google News could drop any given data source and not blink. PadMapper simply is not in the same position.
Lock-in is super common(and often unintentional or unavoidable), but it goes against the ideal of equal opportunity and competitive markets that rewards companies for a continuous commitment to quality and innovation.
I feel that craigslist has done nothing wrong except for standing in the doorway when other people who want to innovate and improve things are trying to get through (like PadMapper).
A Craigslist competitor doesn't need a huge market share to be viable. For me as a seller, it just has to expand my audience of buyers enough to justify the small amount of time it takes to post and manage a second listing.
It's not Craigslist's content. It's our content, the general public's. Craigslist is just a caretaker. Right now, it's a caretaker acting in its own interests against the public's.
Again, disingenuous. CL has the network effect. That's like Microsoft saying, Users are free to install their own browsers. Their current actions are only to preserve that, not to squash abuses. (Which is what they usually do with the power of their TOU.)
Big difference.
The real reason: Craigslist wants to hold onto their monopoly position.
Craigslist has no divine right to its users' information; it just happens to be the only viable option. If Craigslist didn't exist, someone else would, and would probably do it better.
If Craigslist wants to continue existing, they should take advantage of the fact that they are the go-to for online classifieds, create a modest subscription-based API and let the information flow.
The relevant part of the act would be: "Intentionally accessing a computer without authorization to obtain ... information from any protected computer". A "protected computer" is a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication", which fits Craisglist pretty well.
Violation of the clause I quoted is a criminal offense with potential jail time.
Become a for-pay API.
Thoughts?
They already offer an API for mobile.