If Craigslist claimed ownership of the content, wouldn't that make them responsible for the content and open them up to the lawsuits surrounding criminal activities initiated through a Craigslist posting?
Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
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Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#32Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#33Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#34The disclosure at the bottom is rather informative: "Disclosure: Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, is a member of EFF’s Advisory Board, and craigslist has donated to EFF."
This is strangely reminiscent of money and politics (corporations giving money to congressmen, etc)
Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#35Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#36The EFF just lost so much of my respect for this. They're supposed to be protecting the rights of people on the internet, not playing stupid political games one would expect from Congress.
I'd have expelled Craig for that bit of buffoonery, rather than walk on eggshells and tapdance around the fact that he's being a two-faced ass.
You bet your ass I'm mad. This kind of idiocy sickens me, especially coming from a group as supposedly altruistic as the EFF.
Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#37People do read, and some likely thought twice about clicking "Continue", and did not post because of the ridiculous license. If it happened too frequently, CL might have noticed a dip in posts.
I highly, highly doubt this. How many users on a given day are brand new users? How many are users who have used CL occasionally or regularly? And how many of those are likely to read the text of the license on their nth post? Very, very few, I bet, unless CL highlighted the change in red and made them click through a few Confirm dialogs.
i second that :)
Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#38This is the first time I have seen EFF tap-dancing around issues that are important to its mission and I can't help but think that this arises from its relationship to Mr. Newmark. Craigslist has recently engaged in a lawyer-driven campaign to ensure that no third party can use any of the data posted to its site: 1. Quite apart from the "exclusive license" language that it recently added (and has now dropped), it had…
grellas, I've read your thoughtful and thorough legal analysis on HN for years and wanted to say yet again, thank you.
Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#39They no longer need the exclusive since PadMapper's workaround has been effectively killed by the changes Craigslist made to its robots.txt, Google is no longer allowed to index apartments thus PadMapper can not scrape the Google cache.
Re: Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
#40"We understand that craigslist faces real challenges in trying to preserve its character and does not want third parties to simply reuse its content in ways that are out of line with its user community’s expectations and could be harmful to its users."
You don't want your users unexpectedly harmed by saving them hours of their precious lives with a better UI. That would be a tragedy.