5 ms·

This is a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Padmapper. Much like the arguments for pirating music, it

by kyro 14y ago

This is a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Padmapper. Much like the arguments for pirating music, it all boils down to weak justifications for taking something that's not yours. I get that you may need to bend rules to innovate and that they were pulling CL's data in a way that did not affect their bandwidth, but at the end of the day, it's Craigslist that has attracted the users, Craigslist that has engaged the user, and it's Craigslist that has acquired and recorded that data. The fact that Padmapper's UI is better is totally irrelevant and is just a way to distract from the real issue – blatant disregard of CL's wishes to hold on to its data. EDIT: Replies have made some good points, so this isn't so black-and-white to me anymore.

kemayo 14y ago
That said, PadMapper's point about facts not being copyrightable seems to be correct, and Craigslist is suing over something it doesn't have any actual ownership of. Back when PadMapper was scraping the data itself, sure, there was a whole TOS / cost argument to be made. At that point I did think Craigslist was in the right. But that appears to have been gotten around completely legally, and Craigslist has moved into the position of being the bully in this argument.
sytelus 14y ago
But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist. Most users use Craignlist under the assumption it being a "public good" site. If someone is not draining the bandwidth, the public data in Craiglist should be perfectly sharable. It's very clear that Craiglist had been betraying their user's trust for them being "public good" company. The public good companies don't hire top notch lawyers to go after copyright violations.
- jessriedel 14y ago
  Well, craigslist's TOS says explicitly that you give them the right to your post, both to use and defend from scrapers. I guess you could argue that the users aren't aware of this, but I'd be surprised if better publicity of this would have a significant effect on the number of people posting to craigslist.
- Avshalom 14y ago
  >But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist. So what? Lets assume it is your/mine/somebody's data. When we post stuff to Craiglist we give Craigslist a license to use it. We --by the ToS explicitly DON'T and even ignoring the ToS still-- implicitly DON'T give Padmapper a license to use our data. Padmapper was still using data it had no license to use, regardless of who that license should come from.
  - learc83 14y ago
    Still not a copyright violation. You can't copyright a fact. I write a post that says "I am renting an apartment at 221B Baker Street." Padmapper copies it. My post is not copyrightable, so (regardless of what you think of the copyrightability of a collection of facts), Padmapper has not violated the copyright on my single post because it doesn't exist. If I were to include some original creative text that was copyrightable, Padmapper is still fine, because they only copy the facts of the post not the full text.
  - stickfigure 14y ago
    This would be a more compelling argument if you could find one real user who would prefer their data stay on craigslist and not appear on Padmapper. It's fairly safe to say that people who post to craigslist actively desire their ad to be viewed by as many people as possible.
- pdog 14y ago
  I don't even buy the "draining the bandwidth" argument anymore. Craigslist results take up very little space compared with even a small photo.
jessriedel 14y ago
I think it's pretty complicated. You haven't addressed several issues: 1) Craigslist may own text in the ads, but they don't own facts. (Likewise, it's OK for me to tell Alice that Bob posted a poem on his window about cats so that she can go read it, even though it would not be kosher for me to make her a copy, and even if Bob asked me not to tell her.) Padmapper don't use the full ad text, just the fact that the ad exists and discusses housing at a particular location. 2) Many (most?) would argue that, unlike physical property rights, intellectual property rights are only justified insofar as they are a net good for society. I have a Lockean right to the shirt on my back regardless of whether or not there are laws to protect me, but my ability to get 20-year patents (and not 1-year patents or 100-year patents) persists at the pleasure of the legislature. Likewise can be said for copyrights. So even if Craigslist is in the right under the current law, that doesn't mean this situation couldn't be catalyst for good change, and that discussion of crappy UI is important (i.e. not a red herring). 3) Craigslist has monopolistic powers in this market; in the presence of competition, their crappy UI might be forced out of business. One can justify open data requirements as an alternative way of reducing monopolistic powers to standard trust busting methods. Not saying you're wrong, but I can't see why you'd want to put up a top-level comment with broad claims that doesn't address these and other issues raised in previous HN discussions.
pg 14y ago
One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data. The posts belong to the users who submitted them; they just grant a license to Craigslist. And the users clearly don't want or expect this license to be an exclusive one, because the posts are indexed by all the major search engines. The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL. Now it's clear either that they've changed their position, or that the bandwidth argument was just an excuse for shutting down sites they felt might one day compete with them.
- wildmXranat 14y ago
  Hmm, I posted a job ad last week and saw this at the bottom of the submission form: "Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent. " I'm not sure whether your assumption or information was taken first hand from from Craigslist guys, but it doesn't look like that's the current implementation.
  - pg 14y ago
    This is just deliberately overstated language written by lawyers, to give CL maximum legal power if they ever need it. In practice they let search engines index them, and users know and expect that.
    - Avshalom 14y ago
      >and users know and expect that. [citation needed]
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - cynicalkane 14y ago
      You said that the user data is "not Craigslist's data", but the license agreement shows that it is Craigslist's data. They have an exclusive license and power to enforce it. If the license agreement isn't enough, then I guess I don't know what you mean by "not Craigslist's data".
JackC 14y ago
Personally, my intuitions change pretty heavily in what I see as a monopoly situation -- especially a natural monopoly based on network effects. So here's why I support Padmapper, in elaborate detail: Part 1: Craigslist has a natural monopoly. Let's assume (as I believe) that in my city 90% of by-owner apartment listings happen to be posted only to Craigslist at the moment. Since apartment hunters have limited time, most of them (like me) search only on Craigslist. Since landlords have limited time and most apartment hunters only search on Craigslist, most landlords only consider posting on Craigslist. Which means the cycle continues, and next month 90% of by-owner apartment listings will still be posted only on Craigslist. Part 2: the natural monopoly makes Craigslist prohibitively difficult to disrupt. The sole valuable commodity in the marketplace is information about which apartments are available. Craigslist obtains this commodity for free. Craigslist gives away this commodity to consumers for free. Craigslist refuses to share this commodity with anyone else. So disruption is highly unlikely: you would have to generate a commodity (information about apartment listings) at great expense that your competitor gets for free, and then you'd have to make money on it when your competitor gives it away for free. Part 3: Craigslist is taking advantage of its protected position by offering an inferior product. It is the only real estate site on the internet that fails to take advantage of a certain infographic tool developed several millennia ago to represent the most important fact about real estate in a way that humans can easily understand. Which is to say, it doesn't have freakin' maps. This has wasted, literally, many hours of my personal time (longer than it took to write this comment, for example), and the time of hundreds of thousands of other people like me, and it is not a choice that a company facing any kind of competitive threat would make. Part 4: Craigslist's protected position depends on our recognition of its ownership of public information. Landlords are using Craigslist to announce to the world that a certain property exists at a certain location for a certain price. The basic state of a real estate market is that there are a bunch of people trying to advertise their goods, and they'll use the most efficient way to do it. If we as a society decide that, because Craigslist is the most efficient way, it therefore has exclusive ownership of the information it is broadcasting, then Craigslist can continue to use its protected position to offer an inferior product without competition and waste hours of my time. If we decide that Craigslist does not own the basic facts it is broadcasting, then the information becomes a public resource, and services will have to compete to make it conveniently available, causing the market to work better. Given the above four points, I conclude that the information landlords broadcast through Craigslist should not be Craigslist's property, because propertizing that information causes harm to our society that isn't outweighed by the benefits. So I support Padmapper's choice to test Craigslist's legal right to control that information, and I hope it turns out that Craigslist can't. The world always turns out to be more complicated than I want, of course, and maybe there are terrible things that would happen in other situations or industries -- or even in the online real estate market -- if Craigslist didn't have the legal rights it claims it has. I'm open to hearing that argument. But if you're trying to understand why so many are defending Padmapper, I hope this helps.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
Funny, this is still a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Craigslist. When Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension from exporting friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084), nobody defended Facebook. Nobody defended the medical supply industry in an article about how they're blocking startups from selling to hospitals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305). I don't recall ever seeing a comment defending ISPs that attempt to block users from downloading illegal content -- even when those ISPs are themselves part of a media company. Hell, just a little less than three years ago, when Craigslist blocked a Yahoo service for pulling data from CL and customizing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934), the opinions on HN were quite a bit different than they are now. (Amusingly, you left a comment in that thread too -- except that you didn't seem to be defending Craigslist nearly as much as you are now.) If there were no such thing as a good online directory, and somebody built a startup out of digitizing phone books and making them searchable, and the phone companies then filed lawsuits against that startup, would people come out of the woodwork defending the phone companies? I find that difficult to believe. If regional banks started blocking access from Mint.com, would there be grounds for defending them? For me, it simply comes down to what I think of as "hacker morality": this tool sucks, and I can build a better one, so I will. I hate searching for stuff on Craigslist -- in fact, I never use it anymore because of the completely miserable experience that Craigslist is when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If I really wanted to get something from Craigslist, I'd probably write a crawler and indexer of my own -- I already have those tools -- and then stick a filter on to send me an email when it finds whatever I'm looking for. Padmapper is saving me, and a lot of other people without those tools, all of that trouble. Good for them.
- 18pfsmt 14y ago
  That Google Chrome extension for exporting friends from Facebook is interesting because one could replicate Padmapper's functionality in a browser extension using CL's RSS and one of the mapping APIs (Google, OSM, etc.). I can only think of one reason not to make this a browser extension, and that would be to give a middleman the opportunity to completely subsume CL's role. This sounds like it could be a good beginner project for me.
jacoblyles 14y ago
It's a pretty black-and-white issue for me, too. Craigslist is flexing its monopoly power to hold back disruptive innovation, and in the process it is wasting human lifetimes that could be spent on other things. We in the software industry should appreciate the damage that can be done by evil monopolies.

by kyro 14y ago

kemayo 14y ago

That said, PadMapper's point about facts not being copyrightable seems to be correct, and Craigslist is suing over something it doesn't have any actual ownership of. Back when PadMapper was scraping the data itself, sure, there was a whole TOS / cost argument to be made. At that point I did think Craigslist was in the right. But that appears to have been gotten around completely legally, and Craigslist has moved into the position of being the bully in this argument.

sytelus 14y ago

But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist. Most users use Craignlist under the assumption it being a "public good" site. If someone is not draining the bandwidth, the public data in Craiglist should be perfectly sharable. It's very clear that Craiglist had been betraying their user's trust for them being "public good" company. The public good companies don't hire top notch lawyers to go after copyright violations.

jessriedel 14y ago
Well, craigslist's TOS says explicitly that you give them the right to your post, both to use and defend from scrapers. I guess you could argue that the users aren't aware of this, but I'd be surprised if better publicity of this would have a significant effect on the number of people posting to craigslist.
Avshalom 14y ago
>But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist. So what? Lets assume it is your/mine/somebody's data. When we post stuff to Craiglist we give Craigslist a license to use it. We --by the ToS explicitly DON'T and even ignoring the ToS still-- implicitly DON'T give Padmapper a license to use our data. Padmapper was still using data it had no license to use, regardless of who that license should come from.
- learc83 14y ago
  Still not a copyright violation. You can't copyright a fact. I write a post that says "I am renting an apartment at 221B Baker Street." Padmapper copies it. My post is not copyrightable, so (regardless of what you think of the copyrightability of a collection of facts), Padmapper has not violated the copyright on my single post because it doesn't exist. If I were to include some original creative text that was copyrightable, Padmapper is still fine, because they only copy the facts of the post not the full text.
- stickfigure 14y ago
  This would be a more compelling argument if you could find one real user who would prefer their data stay on craigslist and not appear on Padmapper. It's fairly safe to say that people who post to craigslist actively desire their ad to be viewed by as many people as possible.
pdog 14y ago
I don't even buy the "draining the bandwidth" argument anymore. Craigslist results take up very little space compared with even a small photo.

jessriedel 14y ago

I think it's pretty complicated. You haven't addressed several issues: 1) Craigslist may own text in the ads, but they don't own facts. (Likewise, it's OK for me to tell Alice that Bob posted a poem on his window about cats so that she can go read it, even though it would not be kosher for me to make her a copy, and even if Bob asked me not to tell her.) Padmapper don't use the full ad text, just the fact that the ad exists and discusses housing at a particular location. 2) Many (most?) would argue that, unlike physical property rights, intellectual property rights are only justified insofar as they are a net good for society. I have a Lockean right to the shirt on my back regardless of whether or not there are laws to protect me, but my ability to get 20-year patents (and not 1-year patents or 100-year patents) persists at the pleasure of the legislature. Likewise can be said for copyrights. So even if Craigslist is in the right under the current law, that doesn't mean this situation couldn't be catalyst for good change, and that discussion of crappy UI is important (i.e. not a red herring). 3) Craigslist has monopolistic powers in this market; in the presence of competition, their crappy UI might be forced out of business. One can justify open data requirements as an alternative way of reducing monopolistic powers to standard trust busting methods. Not saying you're wrong, but I can't see why you'd want to put up a top-level comment with broad claims that doesn't address these and other issues raised in previous HN discussions.

pg 14y ago

One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data. The posts belong to the users who submitted them; they just grant a license to Craigslist. And the users clearly don't want or expect this license to be an exclusive one, because the posts are indexed by all the major search engines. The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL. Now it's clear either that they've changed their position, or that the bandwidth argument was just an excuse for shutting down sites they felt might one day compete with them.

wildmXranat 14y ago
Hmm, I posted a job ad last week and saw this at the bottom of the submission form: "Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent. " I'm not sure whether your assumption or information was taken first hand from from Craigslist guys, but it doesn't look like that's the current implementation.
- pg 14y ago
  This is just deliberately overstated language written by lawyers, to give CL maximum legal power if they ever need it. In practice they let search engines index them, and users know and expect that.
  - Avshalom 14y ago
    >and users know and expect that. [citation needed]
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - cynicalkane 14y ago
    You said that the user data is "not Craigslist's data", but the license agreement shows that it is Craigslist's data. They have an exclusive license and power to enforce it. If the license agreement isn't enough, then I guess I don't know what you mean by "not Craigslist's data".

JackC 14y ago

Personally, my intuitions change pretty heavily in what I see as a monopoly situation -- especially a natural monopoly based on network effects. So here's why I support Padmapper, in elaborate detail: Part 1: Craigslist has a natural monopoly. Let's assume (as I believe) that in my city 90% of by-owner apartment listings happen to be posted only to Craigslist at the moment. Since apartment hunters have limited time, most of them (like me) search only on Craigslist. Since landlords have limited time and most apartment hunters only search on Craigslist, most landlords only consider posting on Craigslist. Which means the cycle continues, and next month 90% of by-owner apartment listings will still be posted only on Craigslist. Part 2: the natural monopoly makes Craigslist prohibitively difficult to disrupt. The sole valuable commodity in the marketplace is information about which apartments are available. Craigslist obtains this commodity for free. Craigslist gives away this commodity to consumers for free. Craigslist refuses to share this commodity with anyone else. So disruption is highly unlikely: you would have to generate a commodity (information about apartment listings) at great expense that your competitor gets for free, and then you'd have to make money on it when your competitor gives it away for free. Part 3: Craigslist is taking advantage of its protected position by offering an inferior product. It is the only real estate site on the internet that fails to take advantage of a certain infographic tool developed several millennia ago to represent the most important fact about real estate in a way that humans can easily understand. Which is to say, it doesn't have freakin' maps. This has wasted, literally, many hours of my personal time (longer than it took to write this comment, for example), and the time of hundreds of thousands of other people like me, and it is not a choice that a company facing any kind of competitive threat would make. Part 4: Craigslist's protected position depends on our recognition of its ownership of public information. Landlords are using Craigslist to announce to the world that a certain property exists at a certain location for a certain price. The basic state of a real estate market is that there are a bunch of people trying to advertise their goods, and they'll use the most efficient way to do it. If we as a society decide that, because Craigslist is the most efficient way, it therefore has exclusive ownership of the information it is broadcasting, then Craigslist can continue to use its protected position to offer an inferior product without competition and waste hours of my time. If we decide that Craigslist does not own the basic facts it is broadcasting, then the information becomes a public resource, and services will have to compete to make it conveniently available, causing the market to work better. Given the above four points, I conclude that the information landlords broadcast through Craigslist should not be Craigslist's property, because propertizing that information causes harm to our society that isn't outweighed by the benefits. So I support Padmapper's choice to test Craigslist's legal right to control that information, and I hope it turns out that Craigslist can't. The world always turns out to be more complicated than I want, of course, and maybe there are terrible things that would happen in other situations or industries -- or even in the online real estate market -- if Craigslist didn't have the legal rights it claims it has. I'm open to hearing that argument. But if you're trying to understand why so many are defending Padmapper, I hope this helps.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

Funny, this is still a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Craigslist. When Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension from exporting friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084), nobody defended Facebook. Nobody defended the medical supply industry in an article about how they're blocking startups from selling to hospitals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305). I don't recall ever seeing a comment defending ISPs that attempt to block users from downloading illegal content -- even when those ISPs are themselves part of a media company. Hell, just a little less than three years ago, when Craigslist blocked a Yahoo service for pulling data from CL and customizing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934), the opinions on HN were quite a bit different than they are now. (Amusingly, you left a comment in that thread too -- except that you didn't seem to be defending Craigslist nearly as much as you are now.) If there were no such thing as a good online directory, and somebody built a startup out of digitizing phone books and making them searchable, and the phone companies then filed lawsuits against that startup, would people come out of the woodwork defending the phone companies? I find that difficult to believe. If regional banks started blocking access from Mint.com, would there be grounds for defending them? For me, it simply comes down to what I think of as "hacker morality": this tool sucks, and I can build a better one, so I will. I hate searching for stuff on Craigslist -- in fact, I never use it anymore because of the completely miserable experience that Craigslist is when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If I really wanted to get something from Craigslist, I'd probably write a crawler and indexer of my own -- I already have those tools -- and then stick a filter on to send me an email when it finds whatever I'm looking for. Padmapper is saving me, and a lot of other people without those tools, all of that trouble. Good for them.

18pfsmt 14y ago
That Google Chrome extension for exporting friends from Facebook is interesting because one could replicate Padmapper's functionality in a browser extension using CL's RSS and one of the mapping APIs (Google, OSM, etc.). I can only think of one reason not to make this a browser extension, and that would be to give a middleman the opportunity to completely subsume CL's role. This sounds like it could be a good beginner project for me.

jacoblyles 14y ago

It's a pretty black-and-white issue for me, too. Craigslist is flexing its monopoly power to hold back disruptive innovation, and in the process it is wasting human lifetimes that could be spent on other things. We in the software industry should appreciate the damage that can be done by evil monopolies.