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Craigslist Suing Padmapper

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Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A copyright clause designed to allow Craigslist to stop abuse shouldn't be used to squash competitors. That's not dictating "how they should run their business." That's telling them to stop being selfish.

How are they trying to squash competition? Padmapper isn't free to have users submit their listings to their own website?

> How are they trying to squash competition?

Again, disingenuous. CL has the network effect. That's like Microsoft saying, Users are free to install their own browsers. Their current actions are only to preserve that, not to squash abuses. (Which is what they usually do with the power of their TOU.)

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if you want your data to be reposted on another site, then you should repost it. I had to giggle a little bit at this in the grand scheme of the internet, sorry. When I posted something on Facebook Marketplace, I started getting emails and comments from other "market" sites that Facebook had cross-posted my listing to. While it was annoying to not know this up front, the fact that it was more visible and gettin…

In response to your "only helped": on one of the other Padmapper stories here on HN, someone wrote that after their item sold and they cancelled the Craigslist ad, they continued to get contacted about the item because third parties had scraped the ad and did not stop displaying their copy when the ad disappeared from Craigslist.

This happened to me on the Facebook ad too, but I preferred it it over the lack of any response at all - it proved the services were used. Easy to ignore them or send a generic reply.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a group can interfere with how you hunt for a place to live something is up. What entitled bullshit. People/companies do that all the time. Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in a way you didn't like?

> What entitled bullshit. Wanting the market to work isn't entitled BS. It's good civic thinking. Craigslist holding onto its incumbency, counter to the interests of the public is entitled BS. > Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in…

> Craigslist holding onto its monopoly position is a broken market.

This sounds more like whining than anything based in reality. Craigslist has a monopoly on apartment rent listings?

http://www.apartments.com/

http://www.apartmentguide.com/

http://www.zillow.com

http://www.apartmentfinder.com/

http://www.forrent.com/

http://www.apartmentsearch.com/

http://www.rent.com/

http://www.apartmentratings.com/

http://www.rentals.com/Apartments/

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they trying to squash competition? Padmapper isn't free to have users submit their listings to their own website?

> How are they trying to squash competition? Again, disingenuous. CL has the network effect. That's like Microsoft saying, Users are free to install their own browsers. Their current actions are only to preserve that, not to squash abuses. (Which is what they usually do with the power of their TOU.)

So Apple should stop selling iPhones because it has a dominant position in the marketplace because it is the device most preferred by buyers?

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#455
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Craig was speaking truthfully when he made his comment. But he is but one piece of a whole, and that whole includes folks who count the pennies. And business person associated with Craigslist would know that the only value Craigslist has is its listings. Giving those away to be re-used by another web site would never fly with such a person. I don't doubt for a minute when you tell someone is taking money out…

If they go to court and get an opinion it should be really helpful as a guide for other entrepreneurs who see re-processing the information on the web in new ways as the foundation for their business. You mean, like Blekko? The simple, inconvenient truth is most folks who are making money from the web, like search engines, are not content creators (nor content owners), they are content publishers... who publish for f…

In the case of search engines there is already a lot of case law from people suing Google of course. As with most things its a spectrum. Using a search engine as an example (and disclaimer I work for Blekko, a search engine) a search engine crawls the web, then it computes a number of parameters about the page its crawled (what its about, how many people link to it, who does it link to, Etc.) and creates a new piece of information called a 'rank'. Then when a search query comes in the query is used to create a way of recognizing a 'target' page and then the rank is used (and in our case slashtags too) to decide what pages you might be looking for. The results, also include snippets from the page to help the user evaluate whether or not the page is the one they want.

Now that use has generally not been highly contested, people want their pages to be found and so they tolerate search engines searching them. They can be explicit in what pages they want searched and which they don't using robots.txt. So that relationship is pretty well understood. People who ban Blekko (and presumably anyone else) from their robots.txt file are not crawled by us, we recognize and honor that it is there choice if they want to be in our index or not. On the copyright issue however it has been pretty clearly established that 'page rank', like someone's review rating on a movie or an application, constitutes an original work of the creator. There is a lot of experience with things like book reviews where the review, using snippets to illustrate the review, and a rating, are both fair use and the original work of the reviewer.

Google however got in trouble with their news aggregation service. And the bulk of much of the arguments there, were that the snippets were so complete on the news page as to exceed 'fair use' exemptions, and that by aggregating these pages they were 'stealing' traffic that might otherwise go to the news site. The results on those cases were mixed, with some newspapers being removed from Google's index, and others not. Generally everyone that was removed has since been replaced (at the request of the news source) because Google does drive more traffic to a web site than any other web service. So in this case while Google was found to violate the copyright of these news organizations by indexing their newspapers without their consent, the papers later found it in their best interest to give their consent.

Craigslist and Amazon and Ebay are a third kind of question. They are a collection of 'facts' (as many have pointed out) which are derived by a process (placing ads). And in the 'old' world the courts have generally sided with the person who had paid the economic cost for creating those collections. And as PadMapper and others before them have shown, is that there is a great temptation to use those same facts and re-package them into a new collection. This pretty naturally sets up a commercial tension between the original collector and the new user of those same facts. That seems to open another front in copyright litigation and policy. So if this court gets an opinion published it cannot help but be influential as there don't seem to be very many in this space. That could be because judges think the right answer is 'obvious' but I seriously doubt that to be the case.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist makes use of both Google Maps and Yahoo Mapquest to present locations of individual properties through links on the CL site. Note that these are free links, not paid-for API calls. Who's free-riding whom?

Craiglist provides links to Google and MQ, which is the basis of how the Internet and WWW works. Craiglist supplies the actual address data. It would be different if Craiglist embedded the maps from GM or MQ, but in such case CL would probably do so with permission from those companies (possibly even-- gasp --paying for the right to embed maps).

The point I was making is that CL are increasing the utility of their service by using Google/Yahoo to provide specific maps of property locations. The distinction is that the relevant data curation (property locations) is done by CL, not the mapping providers.

I also noted that API usage would have been paid (or at least licensed), so in that sense, CL are (legitimately) freeloading on Google and Yahoo. While the argument could be made that CL are sending traffic to these sites, that same argument would apply to Padmapper.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are they trying to squash competition? Again, disingenuous. CL has the network effect. That's like Microsoft saying, Users are free to install their own browsers. Their current actions are only to preserve that, not to squash abuses. (Which is what they usually do with the power of their TOU.)

So Apple should stop selling iPhones because it has a dominant position in the marketplace because it is the device most preferred by buyers?

Apple's network effect or market position clearly doesn't make other phones and devices a non-starter. Craiglist's network effect and market position clearly makes other housing listing sites a non-starter.

Big difference.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine some clever hacks where Padmapper uses Google targeted searches and Google's cache exclusively to get Craigslist data. Since Craigslist would never ask Google to remove them from their index, I wonder if Craigslist would still go after those who get their data as proxied by Google.

> Padmapper uses...Google's cache exclusively to get Craigslist data. That's what Padmapper is doing right now. They're being sued for it.

I thought Craigslist is suing 3taps because they scrape their site directly?

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk about law. American law to be precise. I talk about physics. They can't even prove it was I that checked the checkbox.

Try using that argument in a court and they'll laugh.

Finding myself in american court in the second scenario in the list of preferable scenarios right after finding myself in third world country prison. So if I'm there I consider myself already gone regardless of any argumentation.

In other courts on the other hand in cases about copyright violations even if accuser provided IP address, logs clearly indicating defendants computer the case was dismissed because he still failed to indicate that it was in fact the defendant that downloaded and/or served the copyrighted file in question.

I'd say same way there's no possibility anyone could prove that it was I who checked the checkbox.

But please ignore me. I'm just venting.

Re: Craigslist Suing Padmapper

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What entitled bullshit. Wanting the market to work isn't entitled BS. It's good civic thinking. Craigslist holding onto its incumbency, counter to the interests of the public is entitled BS. > Padmapper could've run out of money and shut themselves down - would you pursue a court injunction on the basis that they shouldn't be able to interfere with how you hunt for an apartment? How about if they changed the UI in…

> Craigslist holding onto its monopoly position is a broken market. This sounds more like whining than anything based in reality. Craigslist has a monopoly on apartment rent listings? http://www.apartments.com/ http://www.apartmentguide.com/ http://www.zillow.com http://www.apartmentfinder.com/ http://www.forrent.com/ http://www.apartmentsearch.com/ http://www.rent.com/ http://www.apartmentratings.com/ http://www.ren…

Yes. In as much as Microsoft had "competitors" but had as close to a monopoly position in its market to warrant action.

Pedant posturing aside, to those who have "skin in the game," namely those renting and renting-out property and paying real money for leases, Craigslist is the 800 lb gorilla in most markets.

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