[belorn]

Why is it absurd to first withdraw permission to publicly accessible service and then sue if the individual continues unauthorized?

I can easily imagine a public irc channel that ip blocks abusing users that post goatse links (not illegal in itself). If some of those users than bypass that block, is it unreasonable that the owner would want to sue in order to stop the abuse from the then unauthorized access to the irc server?

[tokenizerrr]

Yes, that is absolutely unreasonable. Instead the irc channel should be set to +m and voice given to non-abusing users.

[slavik81]

To me, I think the difference is that the guy posting goatse links is causing actual harm, while the guy scraping the website may have basically no impact. Only cases where there are actually meaningful damages should end up in court.

[tptacek]

The company scraping Craigslist is not having "no impact". Craigslist didn't sue out of pique. They sued because their site was being forked, and they are not an open source project.

It seems reasonable to disagree about whether companies should have the right to prevent forks based on their public data sets ("can you fork the phone book?"). It does not seem reasonable to suggest that Craigslist sued simply in order to be tyrannical.

[mcherm]

The phone book is an excellent example, because rather famously[1] at one point a powerful company tried to use IP laws to prevent someone from forking the actual phone book... and the US Supreme Court ruled that it WAS permitted. That precedent does not apply to this case which is based on different laws preventing access to the data not preventing contacting it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

[amyjess]

> They sued because their site was being forked, and they are not an open source project.

Or, for that matter, because somebody was using up their bandwidth, which is a finite resource, for something other than the intended purpose of the site.

[gergles]

No, they weren't. 3taps was scraping Google, not CL.

[slavik81]

I'm talking specifically about the act of scraping, not about what is done with the data afterwards. The post I was responding to referred to a general scenario, rather than this specific lawsuit.

To focus on the act of scraping itself, consider a case where they download the data and study it privately. That should not go to court, even if they broke the ToS, unless there are measurable damages.

[tptacek]

And because of the nature of 1030g, it couldn't go to court without measurable damages, because CFAA civil claims can only pursue economic damages. So, in a real sense, the implication of using the CFAA in this case is the opposite of what Techdirt manipulatively implies that it is. CFAA limited the scope of this case and reduced the stakes.

edited: this said "for 3taps" before, but I'm not sure that's accurate.

[3am]

It's fair to point out they also sued after they issued a warning shot, in the form of a C & D.

I like your analogy of the site being forked. I don't believe for a 2nd that the companies scraping the CL data and putting a pretty UX on it were doing it out of any sense of altruism.

[eli]

It's reasonable that the owner can sue. But you don't need CFAA to sue someone and it opens the door to serious criminal penalties which, no I do not think are reasonable for an IRC troll or for a Craigslist mapping tool.

[tptacek]

You're the second person in this thread to suggest that the CFAA was somehow a nuclear option.

You're saying this because Techdirt is manipulating you.

The CFAA is in fact the logical private cause of action for suits to enforce terms of service. It is literally the section of the US code about enforcing ToS's.

A civil suit is a civil suit. CFAA-derived civil suits are not especially more scary than other civil suits. It's scary to be sued by Craigslist no matter what. The CFAA has nothing to do with it.

You should be irritated at Techdirt for misinforming you solely to generate rageviews.

[amyjess]

CFAA is necessary so people can defend their property from invaders.

You'd file criminal charges against someone who breaks into your home every night to hurl racial slurs at you and keeps picking your lock no matter how many times you change the locks; why wouldn't you file criminal charges against someone who comes on to your channel/forum/etc. every day to harass your users and uses a number of proxies to change their IP no matter how many times you IP-ban them?