Craigslist Suing Padmapper • Hacker News Board

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#331

Post by dclowd9901 » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 8:52 PM UTC

jaysonelliot wrote: post #66

"(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 But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."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 Craigs…

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#332

Post by aneth4 » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

If we are lucky, they will settle for PadMapper's assets - and use them.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#333

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:01 PM UTC

cwp wrote: post #100

chimi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear that Padmapper is making use of the craigslist posts without the rights to do so, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as "stealing". STEALING transitive verb 1a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stealing If you're going to downvote me, that's fine, but if you do, please show how copyright infrin…

Padmapper doesn't infringe copyrights either. 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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#334

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #265

chimi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear that Padmapper is making use of the craigslist posts without the rights to do so, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as "stealing". STEALING transitive verb 1a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stealing If you're going to downvote me, that's fine, but if you do, please show how copyright infrin…

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.

Maybe, if we get a rule that people aren't allowed to say no, they didn't _steal_ your work, because you still have it.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#335

Post by corford » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #261

freehunter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Grooveshark will probably have started out knowing they'd run in to trouble. Jury's still out on how that's going to end though.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#336

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:06 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #210

Craig Newmark said on Quora that the reason they didn't like people building stuff on top of Craigslist was simply the extra bandwidth they consumed: http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-... But now that 3Taps has found an ingenious way to get at the data with zero extra bandwidth cost to Craigslist (by retrieving it from the Google cache rather than CL itself), it's clear that what Craigslist…

[deleted]

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#337

Post by potatolicious » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:07 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #334

potatolicious wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe, if we get a rule that people aren't allowed to say no, they didn't _steal_ your work, because you still have it .

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#338

Post by runako » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:09 PM UTC

cwp wrote: post #317

runako wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does Padmapper's license to the listing data originate? When do the posters of listings grant Padmapper a license of any kind?

You don't need a license to link to something.

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#339

Post by Kadrith » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:11 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #112

Kadrith wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does PadMapper respect the robots.txt file?

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.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#340

Post by jacoblyles » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 9:14 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #286

pg wrote: post #210

Craig Newmark said on Quora that the reason they didn't like people building stuff on top of Craigslist was simply the extra bandwidth they consumed: http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-... But now that 3Taps has found an ingenious way to get at the data with zero extra bandwidth cost to Craigslist (by retrieving it from the Google cache rather than CL itself), it's clear that what Craigslist…

Craig is doing things right: he is not greedy and he doing it with vision of general purpose. If craiglist is run by a person who investors like to choose as a founder they will be sold for 10M a long time ago. The problem with a lot of startups in SV is that their only objective is to make money. Nothing else. Craigslist is very very rare exception. Now lets downvoting starts...

Flogging yourself doesn't make you righteous. Doing good for the world does.

Craigslist wastes several human lifetimes worth of time every month through maintaining a monopoly product with a shitty UI and refusing to let anyone innovate on top of it. They hold back progress and they are evil. They are the IE6 of classified ads.