Craigslist is the global classified advertisements website
with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted,
services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums which began in the
USA in 1995 when Craig Newmark started an email distribution list of friends,
featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a
web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It
started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and currently covers 50
countries with a search engine, discussion forums, flagging system,
self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories and 'best-of-Craigslist' feature. Over 100 million classified ads run on its site
each month. Now let’s be clear – postings are usually user
generated and the only moderated content was for the now defunct US ‘adult’
section.
So what’s the fuss? Well, back in 2012 mashup sites such as
padmapper.com and housingmaps.com began overlaying Craigslist data with additional
data such as Google Maps, and adding their own search filters to improve
usability. PadMapper took real estate listings and added ‘value’ to them,
taking a series of data points such as the cost of apartment, location, size and then allowed the customer to search on that basis. And when the customer found what they
wanted, they would then be directed back to Craigslist to read the full posting
and complete the transaction .
Despite what might be considered a ‘win win’ situation, Craigslist
were not best pleased, and In June 2012, Craigslist changed its terms of service
to disallow the practice. In July 2012, Craigslist filed a lawsuit against
padmapper.com along and 3taps, who ‘scraped’ the data from Craigslist, and a
third defendant, Lovely. The claim was twofold: A copyright claim and then claims
relating to the violation of the
Craigslist terms of service (ToS) and further claims under the Computer Fraud
& Abuse Act (CFAA): Craigslist’s ToS do allow for websites like Google and
Bing to “scrape” and index their website, but do not allow for other non-general
indexing websites to do so. Some of these latter claims continue – somewhat controversially.
The copyright claim was based on Craigslist argument that
(1) Craigslist retained copyright to postings made by its customers and (2) taking
these data points of cost and location constituted infringement. US District Judge Charles Breyer has now said that the
copyright claim must fail as Craigslist never owned the copyright material,
save the Judge allowed the copyright claims to proceed for user-created posts submitted between July
16, 2012 and August 8, 2012 because Craigslist required that users provide the
site with “exclusive” rights to their submissions during those weeks. That language was dropped from it's submission
form after widespread criticism. Judge
Breyer said that although Craigslist posts were “original” enough to warrant
copyright protection, save for that short period, the ToS didn’t give
Craigslist exclusive rights to the users’ posts.
As an aside, the CFAA claim continues - but to widespread
criticism:
“It’s curious that a company that prominently displays
opposition to the CFAA and encourages customers to get involved to fix the
CFAA, is at the same time suing start-ups for violating the CFAA for precisely
the problems for which tech activists have ridiculed the CFAA”.
It’s worth noting In 2005, San Francisco Craigslist's ‘men
seeking men’ section was attributed to facilitating sexual encounters and was
the second most common correlation to syphilis infections and the company was facing pressure from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which
prompted CEO to say that the site has a very small staff and that the public
must "police themselves". However
advertisements for "adult" (previously "erotic") services
were initially given special treatment, then closed entirely on September 4,
2010. At the time Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, said, "Craigslist isn't legally culpable for these
posts, but the public pressure has increased and Craigslist is a small company"
whilst Brian Carver, attorney and assistant professor at UC Berkeley, said that
legal threats could have a chilling effect on online expression. "If you
impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users
do, then they're not going to take chances. It would likely result in the
takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression."
So once the darling of the tech world, it's now in the doghouse, accused of bullying and trying to stifle innovation - and competitors - with one commentator saying
“A lawsuit of this nature is much more suited to an old
legacy gatekeeper, rather than a company that is supposedly of the internet
generation. To say it's disappointing that Craigslist would engage in these
kinds of tactics is an understatement”
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/30/court-says-craigslists-hacking-copyright-claims-against-padmapper-and-rivals-hold-up-for-now/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/04/30/craigslists-allegations-of-copyright-violations-thrown-out/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist