An Open Letter to Craig Newmark

I don't think this is what's happening here - for either Krrb or Padmapper.

It's important to note that Krrb and Padmapper both make the distinction that they're scraping facts, not posts. One is copyrightable, the other is not.

You can lay claim to the sentence "I have a room in a 2-bedroom apartment for rent in Williamsburg, going for $1500"

But you do not have the right to own the fact that there's a room for rent in Williamsburg, in a 2-bedroom, for $1500. It would seem that Krrb and Padmapper both scrape the facts only, not textual content - or at least, that's what the letter seems to say.

This is a frequent misunderstanding of the Padmapper issue. Padmapper never scraped posts wholesale from Craigslist - it scraped and displayed only structured data (i.e. facts), and in fact if you wanted to contact the seller it links you directly to the Craigslist post!

(I don't strongly believe in this, but I do thing both IV and Craigslist suck. And it's worse in a way because IV was always evil; Craigslist actually was a force for good at one point, and has become evil.)

The postings themselves belong (in a moral sense; I'm not sure what the current craigslist license is) to the people posting them. If I post my room for rent, I would be happy to have more people see the listing, especially with a clean UI (like padmapper). I'd be aggrieved if Craig Newmark blocked people from seeing the listing. The "server load" issue is a red herring; people have been more than willing to pay a reasonable fee to offset that, and it's a minimal amount of load to begin with.

It's even more egregious in the case of a posting tool, which is what this appears to be.

I agree IV is a vastly bigger deal; I personally just soft-boycott Craigslist, but if I had a chance to destroy IV while taking only moderate legal or financial damage, I'd do so. But I think a lot of that is due to the patent system being totally horrible, and copyright being only moderately broken (and trademark being only slightly broken). If Craig/Buckmaster had the ability to use the patent system to kill services which might compete with them, they probably would claim it was "helping their users by making the market more comprehensive and efficient", too.

Sure, it's the KKK vs. Augusta National, but mostly a difference in degree.

And that's also precisely what a lot of the CL scrapers want to go after— try to pick up money that CL is leaving on the table.

hmm.. so this guy - Craig - works his ass off all these years and builds a site that makes him money. HIS hard work paying HIM money.Now someone else comes along and wants to build a site that has the potential to hurt Craig's work..

Wonder why Craig doesn't like it..

Before pointing a finger at Craig, how about you build something from grounds up, get to Craig's level and then allow anyone else to just take stuff away from you, piece by piece.

He is still providing value to people by letting people post and use it. Of-course he is making money, but anything worth charging will be charged.

He is just as passionate about his site and what he has built as you are. Maybe he just doesn't want you to build a building on his island. So be it, there is a whole world out there waiting for you.

Bottom line : Stop wasting time, build something else. You are smart enough to work on a completely unique idea of your own. Why spend your energy on sipping from someone else's ocean when you have an ocean inside you.