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Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

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Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#181

Post by achompas »

dangrossman wrote: post #22
achompas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit knee-jerk, no? I highly doubt you waive the right to repost your listing ANYWHERE; rather, this is legalese allowing them to sue anyone using their listings without consent.

Read the text. Exclusive license. That means you may not license your post to any other site; giving someone else permission to display your listing is a grant of a license, and such a license is explicitly mentioned in the terms of any UGC site, including Craigslist. The difference is those other terms always say NON-exclusive. Go ahead and stop by YouTube and do a search for the word. This isn't boilerplate legales…

Are you a lawyer?

EDIT: Okay, let me be less flippant. I ask about you being a lawyer because we don't know how Craigslist will enforce this policy. Everyone is assuming the worst -- CL will not let you post anywhere else! -- when, in practice, such a policy is probably not enforceable in court.

You have a well-reasoned comment, sure, but someone can't really speak to the enforceability of this without practicing law.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#182

Post by [deleted] »

dangrossman wrote: post #22
achompas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit knee-jerk, no? I highly doubt you waive the right to repost your listing ANYWHERE; rather, this is legalese allowing them to sue anyone using their listings without consent.

Read the text. Exclusive license. That means you may not license your post to any other site; giving someone else permission to display your listing is a grant of a license, and such a license is explicitly mentioned in the terms of any UGC site, including Craigslist. The difference is those other terms always say NON-exclusive. Go ahead and stop by YouTube and do a search for the word. This isn't boilerplate legales…

[deleted]

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#183

Post by jetti »

alttab wrote: post #173
jetti wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Craig Newmark is a lazy monopolist at this point. All profit taking, no innovation." This argument is way overblown. If you ask most companies for the data they generate, they would say no. So singling out Craigslist and using that as an argument as to why Craig is a "jerk" is silly because he would be in good company if that were the case. Bottom line is that CL isn't a hard site to reproduce and even do it in a be…

I don't think its overblown. The major issue here is CraigsList owns the network for internet classifieds, but hasn't done anything to improve their product in a decade. The Craigslist experience has been diminishing ever since: 1) Spam, Scams, and false postings 2) Postings not taken down because they've already been sold 3) Terrible interface for adding pictures, uploading media to help sell. Generally, the guy is…

"Generally, the guy is sitting on top of a monopoly and is actively choosing to do nothing with it other than collect money, and prevent anyone from usurping his throne."

There is nothing stopping somebody from coming up with a site that beats craigslist, nothing at all. It will be hard, for sure, but it can and will be done eventually. So it isn't really preventing anybody from usurping his throne.

"But when you add that monopoly, and then stifle innovation because you are either lazy or incompetent is not doing the world any good. "

I hear this argument over and over, that CL is stifling innovation and I just don't see it. It seems like a bunch of would-be competitors want an easy in. There is nothing stopping a competitor from taking over, except a large amount of work. Just because a company won't let anybody use their data, doesn't mean they are stifling innovation. It would be a different story if CL tried to claim IP protection on internet classifieds but that isn't the case.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#184

Post by alttab »

jetti wrote: post #183
alttab wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its overblown. The major issue here is CraigsList owns the network for internet classifieds, but hasn't done anything to improve their product in a decade. The Craigslist experience has been diminishing ever since: 1) Spam, Scams, and false postings 2) Postings not taken down because they've already been sold 3) Terrible interface for adding pictures, uploading media to help sell. Generally, the guy is…

"Generally, the guy is sitting on top of a monopoly and is actively choosing to do nothing with it other than collect money, and prevent anyone from usurping his throne." There is nothing stopping somebody from coming up with a site that beats craigslist, nothing at all. It will be hard, for sure, but it can and will be done eventually. So it isn't really preventing anybody from usurping his throne. "But when you add…

I didn't mean to say they are stifing innovation because they won't let some UI hipsters gain access to their data - but because they aren't willing to cooperate at all, AND don't do anything to make internet classifieds anything other than what it already is... from 12 years ago.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#185

Post by MartinCron »

One thing that never comes up in these discussions is community moderation. Craigslist relies on the community to flag off content that's inappropriate (spam, overpost, whatever).

I wonder of the Craigslist folks are looking at alternative interfaces as ways people will get the good stuff (real listings) without having to do the work of wading through and flagging off the bad stuff.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#186

Post by defen »

alttab wrote: post #177
defen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> effectively posters can ignore this legalese Operationally, probably true. However, ethically this is no different than the people who said PadMapper should just use "Craigslist's" data regardless of what Craigslist thought about the situation. To be consistent, either you believe: 1) It's ok for PadMapper to re-list Craigslist's data without Craigslist's consent. OR 2) If you post a housing listing to Craigslist,…

If CraigsList ever went after a poster who also posted their classified on another site, that would probably be the day they begin to unravel. You don't want to instill fear into posters (IE, their product) that they could get sued by posting even a similar ad on a competing site. Then you enter the territory "I only have access to people who check craigslist" instead of an array of additional, complementary options.…

Right, I don't think they would ever sue their own users. But the point is that you don't get to simply ignore parts of an agreement that you don't agree with, because "that's not what they meant". So the people who were saying that PadMapper has no right to use Craigslist's data should be careful not to submit to multiple listing services if they ever put a house up for rent on Craigslist, if they care at all about consistent application of their principles.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#187

Post by res0nat0r »

alttab wrote: post #184
jetti wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Generally, the guy is sitting on top of a monopoly and is actively choosing to do nothing with it other than collect money, and prevent anyone from usurping his throne." There is nothing stopping somebody from coming up with a site that beats craigslist, nothing at all. It will be hard, for sure, but it can and will be done eventually. So it isn't really preventing anybody from usurping his throne. "But when you add…

I didn't mean to say they are stifing innovation because they won't let some UI hipsters gain access to their data - but because they aren't willing to cooperate at all, AND don't do anything to make internet classifieds anything other than what it already is... from 12 years ago.

Why should they spend money and time because you are whining their interface is ugly and hasn't changed? I can apply this argument to 50% of the websites I visit every day. I'll start: eBay.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#188

Post by [deleted] »

jeremymims wrote: post #122
hnriot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems very naive to think that Craig gives a damn about padmapper, they (CL) have every right to license their data to whomever they want, and PM choose not to seek such a license so I seriously doubt Eric would really stand much of a chance getting a job with CL. You speak as though CL is broken, and it clearly isn't, as a marketplace it functions well. You may not like the website, but it's marketplace first,…

Actually, Craig has a history of speaking personally with founders using CL data, acting nice, and then mysteriously shutting down their mechanism for getting data without replying. Even if they weren't trying to make money. http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/craigslist-yahoo-pipes/ Craigslist is broken. And successful. Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Newspapers are broken yet they'll do nearly $20 billion of d…

[deleted]

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#189

Post by alttab »

defen wrote: post #186
alttab wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If CraigsList ever went after a poster who also posted their classified on another site, that would probably be the day they begin to unravel. You don't want to instill fear into posters (IE, their product) that they could get sued by posting even a similar ad on a competing site. Then you enter the territory "I only have access to people who check craigslist" instead of an array of additional, complementary options.…

Right, I don't think they would ever sue their own users. But the point is that you don't get to simply ignore parts of an agreement that you don't agree with, because "that's not what they meant". So the people who were saying that PadMapper has no right to use Craigslist's data should be careful not to submit to multiple listing services if they ever put a house up for rent on Craigslist, if they care at all about…

I don't conflate the two at all.

Padmapper scraping data put up on CraigsList and adding it to their own listings is very very different than me putting my own listing on multiple sites.

I don't see this as a "application of principles" issue. The principle I'm consistently applying is "I have the right to tell whomever I want about something I want to sell." And Craigslist is applying the consistent principle that the listing I provided belongs to them. If you ask me, putting my listing somewhere else makes it a different listing, because it didn't originate at craigslist (Like stolen listings on PadMapper), but instead, originated through me.

To apply my principle consistently, I wouldn't post a link to my Craigslist posting on another site, but I am perfectly entitled to re-post its content where-ever I please.

Re: Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting

#190

Post by chc »

CodeCube wrote: post #134
chc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such software exists. It's called a spinner. Unfortunately, AFAIK it doesn't actually get around the copyright issues because it's a mechanical translation, not an independent creative work.

interesting, didn't know there was already a little cottage industry here. I'm totally not advocating it, but I'm curious how would anyone know (assuming the spinner actually outputs quality copy)? I guess it would be up to to the prosecution to prove it, or the defense to lie about it, should it come to that.

It's mainly used for various kinds of black hat SEO (comment spam, automatically generating thousand-page websites and so on). From what I've seen, the quality ranges from atrocious (e.g. simply running random words through a thesaurus) to passable, but the goal is just to make the text look reasonably unique to a machine, not to skirt copyright law. If you were given the output and a list of potential source texts, you would not have any trouble figuring out which was the parent.
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