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Craigslist Suing Padmapper

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Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#181

http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-... In particular, read the comments by Craig himself. Funny how these things change.

Snip from Craig - "Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple."

I guess that wasn't true.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#182

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…

[deleted]

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#183

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…

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#184

The tone in this article is unbelievable. > 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 com…

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#185

This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, but it brings up the 'easy problem' / 'hard problem' (E/H-P) conundrum quite nicely. The conundrum is that it is 'easy' to take an existing, quality data source, and re-skin it for broader market appeal. This is something that Craigslist should be doing but perhaps through poor management are not. It is 'hard' to take a conceptual model of skinning and buil…

>This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, But that's the thing. It isn't their data. They specifically say so in their TOS. The copyright belongs to the user. You can't say the listing belongs to the user (to protect you from liability) on one hand, and then say the data belongs to craigslist on the other. They could always do what map companies have done forever to prevent copyright. Facts can't…

The individual posts belong to the users, that is true. However one post alone is worthless. What's valuable is Craigslist's collection of posts with lots of relevant data (location, description, price, etc). This collection belongs to Craigslist because their servers provide the environment for it, plus they wrote the architecture and back-end to support it.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#186

This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, but it brings up the 'easy problem' / 'hard problem' (E/H-P) conundrum quite nicely. The conundrum is that it is 'easy' to take an existing, quality data source, and re-skin it for broader market appeal. This is something that Craigslist should be doing but perhaps through poor management are not. It is 'hard' to take a conceptual model of skinning and buil…

>This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, But that's the thing. It isn't their data. They specifically say so in their TOS. The copyright belongs to the user. You can't say the listing belongs to the user (to protect you from liability) on one hand, and then say the data belongs to craigslist on the other. They could always do what map companies have done forever to prevent copyright. Facts can't…

I hear you, but I don't know if the courts will agree with your interpretation. The reason for that is that the courts will look at the consequence of having that interpretation widely accepted and the impact on the current state of affairs. There are many many places where this has been litigated and the courts always come down on the side of the data aggregator owning rights to the data aggregated.

If PadMapper wanted to legally exploit the fact that the users own the listings, not Craigslist, they would have to establish a relationship with the user and get the information directly from them. They could contact the listing owners and suggest they list on PadListing. They can 'spiff' people who do so (meaning give them some benefit if they list on PadListing and the person discovers and rents through PadMapper). If they can prove that the listing owner asked them to list their property, Craigslist can't sue.

Alternatively PadMapper "need only"[1] create their own apartment listing service to have their own database where people listing apartments go to them directly. And that is a much harder thing to do than something which scrapes the listings from Craigslist and drops them on to a Google Map.

As a proof-of-concept, PadMapper is excellent. As a product, it has a data contamination issue.

[1] The scare quotes are there to acknowledge that its a challenge to get people to move from the known, to the new. I am trying to move people from Google to a new search service, its hard, its slow, but its the only way to do this and avoid this sort of litigation.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#187
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Presumably 3Taps violates Google's ToS to get the data from them ?

I would really love to know that kind of shady proxy bot army they have implemented in order to scrape Google on such a scale.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's stopping someone from making a craiglist like website with an awesome UI?

The challenge in building a brand and an audience that Craigslist has assembled.

If you build it, doesn't automatically mean that they will come.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's stopping someone from making a craiglist like website with an awesome UI?

network effects
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