[geofft]

Have you used Padmapper? It was better than free. It was much nicer than Craigslist for the same queries, but -- because of Craigslist's size and entrenched position -- the data largely remained on Craigslist, despite Padmapper also having a free posting interface. That might be fair business, but it certainly wasn't a fair comparison of their products or philosophies.

Your analogy of communism may be entirely too apt, given how communism played out in practice last century. Sure, you got the overthrow of the capitalist economy, but if you were a tiny country who didn't really want to agree with Moscow on everything, sucks to be you.

[whyenot]

I used PadMapper. It was fantastic, the user interface was so much better than CL. ...but its scraping of CL postings was risky and morally wrong. The "fuck the rules" approach has worked for Uber and AirBNB, but it's not going to work everywhere.

[gohrt]

Note that AirBnB's initial growth was largely built on Craigslist spam (spamming Craigslist's users, in direct violation of the site TOS).

https://www.google.com/?#q=airbnb+craigslist+spam

[MichaelGG]

Why is it morally wrong? It may be a risky technical decision, but how can it be morally wrong? Would it have been better if the data was processed via a client-side browser plugin?

And Uber's "fuck the rules" are on a totally different level than sending HTTP requests to a server to aggregate publicly accessible information.

[sangnoir]

1. The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used

2. Provider of a service can set out terms of service

3. When using someone else resource, it is polite to do as asked ("Please don't finish all the staples" or "Please don't use my stapler John. Jane can still use it")

Increasing CLs server load & increasing their bandwidth costs was morally questionable, it became clearly immoral once they knew CL didn't like what they were doing.

[rev_bird]

> The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used

I'm not entirely sure I agree with this part. If I say, "John's website is at this address," John doesn't get to say "HEY! I get to decide who links to me," because copyright isn't for facts, it's for content. That's why I disagree so vehemently with the PadMapper decision: All they were saying was "There's a CL post for this address." That's not content, and it's certainly not enough content to replace the functionality CL sued over.

Also, FWIW 3taps wasn't using the CraigsList servers: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/3taps-countersues...

[geofft]

> 1. The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used

Padmapper mined data (apartment locations, prices, number of bedrooms, URL to Craigslist post), not creative presentation. Even if we believe that it's somehow morally reasonable for Craigslist to have copyright over the text of user postings, the data Padmapper required was clearly not copyrightable. This was a CFAA case, not a copyright case.

(Yes, in practice Padmapper also displayed descriptions and photos, but they could have avoided doing so, and the service would still have been useful.)

[ericd]

Thanks for clearing that up. We actually didn't include descriptions, though, just the title as part of the link back to the original.

[MichaelGG]

If we're talking about morals, then the fact that CL only got copyright via a click wrap assignment, and that most postings aren't copyrightable because there's no creativity, and that the actual creators (posters) benefited from this access, I don't think things held up.

I'd also be surprised to find a real increase in load, if the scraping service served end users. Otherwise those users would be requesting directly to CL. And, if the 3rd party service worked by riding on the back of users (say, via a browser add-on), would that suddenly change things?

[MichaelCrawford]

The Molotov Cocktail was invented by the Finnish in honor of the Soviet minister who initiated the USSR's invasion of their "tiny country".