Hm, would you not say that what Craigslist really dislikes is their competition piggy-backing off their data? Craigslist seemed quite happy with the existing situation until Padmapper launched their own listing service.
Though I agree that it's not in the spirit of a .org, if such concept exists.
"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."
> You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution...
Rightshaven (copyright troll) was granted the same right by the copyright holders they represent, yet the judge ruled they didn't have standing to sue on the copyright holder's behalf.
The Righthaven case is slightly different, though I hope the logic still applies. (I'm not a lawyer, but I read the Righthaven opinion[1] when the Padmapper/3Taps workaround was originally discussed.) The difference is that Righthaven was granted merely the right to sue on behalf of the original copyright holder, but none of the exclusive rights that copyrights actually bestow upon their owners. It could be interpreted that posters grant Craigslist some of their exclusive rights ("copy, perform, display," etc.), and suing to protect those rights may be legally kosher. I know of no such precedent.
My personal interpretation/hope is that the right to sue for copyright infringement is nontransferable, which would give Craigslist no standing to sue. Individual posters could sue, however.
That's a given. The only way they'd have authorization by the owners of the data would be to e-mail the poster of every CL listing and ask for it. We know they don't do that. The key point is whether there's copyright infringement at all, not whether it was authorized.
And you automatically grant Craigslist your first born child and all future earnings and your left index finger. Laywers love to fill these things with unenforceable outlandish crap. The courts are more discerning.
Err, that's actually a very reasonable Terms of Service.
It says that you own everything you post, but you are granting them the rights to use it. The only unusual bit is that you are additionally granting them the right to go after people who scrape your content on your behalf.
That's not that unusual for sites that contain user-generated content. If someone's hosting a blog full of scraped YouTube videos, YouTube can go after them without contacting the owner of each individual video.
The grant is not exclusive and the authority to decide what is an is not authorized is not claimed by CL. If it is unauthorized they claim rights and causes. You can't have a non-exclusive grant without this distinction.
Exactly right. And if you want your data to be reposted on another site, then you should repost it.
Craigslist is delivering exactly what it its users signed up for (no more no less). People posting ads on Craigslist do not necessarily want or intend for it to be reposted on other sites.
"People posting ads on Craigslist do not necessarily want or intend for it to be reposted on other sites."
That argument appears to be invalidated by Craiglist's own terms of use, which say that when you upload a listing to Craigslist they can syndicate it wherever they want (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287519).
Well, that's a fair point, but I don't think that right matters much unless and until they exercise it. A better argument (against myself) is that they're apparently willing to sell some type of access to your posts for use on mobile apps.
Still, I think there's something admirable in the simplicity and transparency of interacting with Craigslist. What you see is pretty much exactly what you get.
The key point is that the TOS says that you grant Craigslist the right to redistribute your listing where ever they see fit, it doesn't say some third party entity has the right to do that.
As far as I'm aware, if you post information in a place where it will be publicly accessible, then you are tacitly agreeing that third parties will be able to access it and use it as they please. That's not a right that needs to be given to these third parties. It exists from the get-go, and must be explicitly taken away by something like copyright.
So I can legally start amazon-copied-reviews.com and scrape every product review from amazon.com with my own referrer links to Walmart without fear of repercussion? Sweet.
> 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 getting more bites because of it only helped me make the sale quicker. If a service wants to piggyback off of another to make my postings more buoyant, as a user and seller, I don't have a problem with it.
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.
Padmapper's isn't "reposting" any given listing -- it displays an abbreviated digest of the listing in its search results, and then if the user clicks, it takes them to the original listing.
If this is illegal or otherwise objectionable without an explicit agreement from each Craigslist poster, I'm not really sure how a search engine or even descriptive hyperlinking is kosher without explicit agreement from each website indexed or referred to.
The point is Google respects publishers' desire not to be indexed. Padmapper does not. Robots.txt is simply a common method for conveying that message. It's not like Padmapper could argue they didn't know CL was unhappy; they got a certified letter!
This is just semantics. Google respects publishers who do not want their sites listed.
True, but that's irrelevant to the comment I was replying to. We are talking about user expectations with regard to content they posted being made available on other sites.
Hm, would you not say that what Craigslist really dislikes is their competition piggy-backing off their data? Craigslist seemed quite happy with the existing situation until Padmapper launched their own listing service.
Though I agree that it's not in the spirit of a .org, if such concept exists.