[wwweston]

> lets not have to go over this again

Well, since you've clearly been over this more carefully than most of us, maybe you could be troubled just a bit to elaborate on these questions one more time:

* Is it clear that the kind of data that craigslist published can in fact be "owned"? Because no matter what their terms claim, the legal analyses I've read aren't positively conclusive.

* Why is what Padmapper did any different than a search engine? Contrary to some assertions, PadMapper was not republishing listings wholesale -- they published digests (making the ownership issue even less tenable) along with hyperlinks, which sounds a lot like a search engine to me (pretty much what they are). Or even a typical anchor tag itself: the contents of such a tag are generally a digest, the attribute presents the hypertext.

* If you agree these activities are something people shouldn't be able to do without permission, are you fine with a web where search indexing or even linking is essentially by agreement only? This is not an academic question, btw -- there have been lawsuits over linking: http://www.salon.com/1999/08/12/deep_links/