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Craigslist is a privately owned website, they can ban you at will.

That said, you've already given the solution to your problem yourself. Instead of crawling craigslist, crawl google instead.




In the epic 3taps vs. CL battle, CL claimed copyright on all posts, which wasn't supported by their TOS. So they updated their TOS to give them worldwide exclusive rights to ads.

CL finally backed down when the EFF told them to, which says a lot because the EFF is practically owned by CL.


> because the EFF is practically owned by CL.

Sorry?

I'm totally floored by that, did I miss something?

I know that CL donated some sum of money to the EFF but that was a settlement.


The EFF is an outspoken critic of the CFAA and has admonished multiple entities for threatening criminal prosecution. When Craigslist threatened me the first thing I did was contact the EFF. They didn't ignore me. They told me there is nothing they were willing to to at the time, which in my eyes was worse than just ignoring me.

Only until it became a high profile issue with 3taps did the EFF speak out against CL.

That was about a year after I contacted them and they only did after 3taps started getting press.

To me it was pretty clear that they didn't want to bite the hand that fed them, until they had to or else lose all credibility.


> Craigslist is a privately owned website, they can ban you at will.

I don't think it is as simple. Wouldn't selectively banning competitors of Yahoo search, break some competition/anti-monopoly rules/laws?




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