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Craigslist Suing Padmapper

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Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#101

Post by debacle »

rabidsnail wrote: post #92
debacle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care you explain? I don't know what the CFAA is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act 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 w…

I think they tried to circumvent that using 3tap or whatever the site was that was scraping Google's cache.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#102

Post by Goronmon »

rprasad wrote: post #35
picklefish wrote: post #15

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.

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#104

Post by eli »

freehunter wrote: post #57
brador wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flying under the radar hoping we don't get caught and sued for something we know is wrong" should not be a part of any reasonable business plan.

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.

OK... but I still don't feel bad for crazy, unreasonable business plans that fail.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#105

Post by gamble »

avolcano wrote: post #27
picklefish wrote: post #15

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 prost…

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#106

Post by mnicole »

I think Padmapper in particular is in a unique position where while they started with CL listings, it's proven itself an invaluable enough service to enough of us to the point where I'd use it exclusively to list my apartment over Craigslist. I'd even pay month-to-month for exclusive or time-sensitive listings given the way I use it.

Whether or not Padmapper is in the right here, CL's long-standing stance in not evolving their UI or creating a decent API is going to bite them in the ass. Helping people sort your content is now more important for them than the idea that change is bad or time-consuming. As many people have said in the past, it wouldn't take much to really bring CL up-to-speed, but if they don't want to do it themselves, they should at least make it an option for others to pay a fee to use the data.

Edit: Didn't realize http://www.padlister.com/ already existed. Score.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#107

Post by debacle »

mootothemax wrote: post #53
debacle wrote: post #32

> 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.

Agreed - there have been an awful lot of armchair lawyers asserting that there's more to this case than there really is.

There really is a lot to this case and a lot of precedent to be set, I wont deny that, but PadMapper doesn't have the resources to fight this battle.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#108

Post by declan »

nostromo wrote: post #60

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?

CL allows Google (as a general-purpose search engine) in its TOU. It doesn't allow Padmapper/3taps. And in this context the TOU are enforceable. I wrote about this a few weeks ago here: https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/HcCuHVG7...

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#109

Post by IanDrake »

Kadrith wrote: post #96
wickedchicken wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

Does PadMapper respect the robots.txt file?

PadMapper uses 3Taps.com to get the data. 3Taps gets Craigslist data through Google. Google's bot respects robots.txt.

So, yes.

[edit for clarity, and for misspelling clarity]

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