[tiddchristopher]

You're right about that, and I think that's going to make their claim a bit unsteady. But I see an argument they might make:

1. Classified ads are facts, with negligible creativity put into their composition. 2. Facts are not copyrightable. 3. Therefore, 3Taps can scrape the ads. 4. If any ad actually does have creativity / an applicable copyright, the copyright holder can contact 3taps with a complaint.

Basically a "safe harbor" take on the whole thing. What do you think?

[bathat]

Feist v. Rural (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) seems to indicate the the arrangement of the facts is copyrightable, (if there is even a minimal degree of creativity) even though the facts themselves are not. The court held the alphabetic arrangement of names is not sufficient to warrant copyright protection, and it seems logical that mere temporal arrangement of classifieds would not merit protection either. However, it seems as though 3Taps would need to find a way to rearrange the facts presented within the advertizement, because that certainly is a creative process.

The seller has the freedom to write text a description and include pictures. Photographs have a long history of copyright protection, as does written work. Simply copying the specification sheet for a particular model of TV into the ad, for example, might not be copyrightable, but how does 3Taps sort those from the rest?

I just stole this from a random Craigslist ad:

"Black futon in good condition. The mattress is a lot thicker than most futons. It is pretty easy to assemble. You must be able to pick it up though because I do not have a truck. I am moving in a week so I need to get rid of it, asking for 100 or better offer. Please use the link above to email me. "

That the object is a futon, that said futon is black, thicker than average, easy to assemble and in good condition are all facts. The seller could have presented those facts in any number of ways, but he or she chose this way (proper spelling, for example, and mostly written in complete sentences) because he or she thought that would generate a better response. The only way I can see 3Taps on solid ground is if they can take the ad text, use it to generate a set of facts, and rewrite the ad from that (analogous to the way the PC BIOS was reverse-engineered, but done mechanically (I can't imagine it would scale well to have humans rewrite the ads))

[tiddchristopher]

Excellent points, especially regarding photographs. I was thinking of that case already, and hadn't considered the arrangement of facts within a post; what came to mind first was the collection of posts as their own arrangement of facts.