[jasonkester]

This is really silly. Reading the article, it seems that:

1. Craigslist donated a bunch of money to somebody (which seems like a good thing)

2. Craigslist sued some company for scraping their data and using it in violation of their Terms of Service. And won a settlement. (which seems like a good thing)

So in short, good job Craigslist. Why is the author so angry?

[chaostheory]

> Why is the author so angry?

Because you didn't really read the article (or possibly the article isn't well written but I understood it)

1. Your order of events is wrong. Craigslist sued. Won. Then used the proceeds from the lawsuit to donate. This isn't money earned normally.

2. The problem is the lawsuit itself. Craigslist is abusing a law that is meant to deal with hackers intruding on someone's private network. Visiting someone's publicly accessible website and access publicly accessible data is not intruding on someone else's network. Chances are other 3rd parties will now start to abuse this law. i.e. This somewhat reminds me of companies suing people for summarizing a news article into a blog post and linking back to the name original article. In this case, I believe the 3rd parties were creating embedded Google Maps based on the addresses found on Craigslist listing (because Craigslist pre-lawsuit refused to do so) and linking back to the original listing.

TDLR Craigslist successfully stopped a company from fair use of their public content by accusing them of hacking into their network. Craigslist then donates some of the proceeds of lawsuit's 'damages' to the EFF.

[jasonkester]

But wait, you haven't added any new information. You've just re-stated the information in the article.

So yes, they sued before donating. And yes, they used the proceeds. But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.

Even reading your comment (or its sibling that was posted during the same minute) gives enough information to come to that conclusion.

Craigslist said "don't scrape our data". This other company scraped their data and used it to build their business, so Craigslist sued. That's exactly the world I'd like to live in.

[chaostheory]

> But wait, you haven't added any new information. You've just re-stated the information in the article.

Yes because from the little that you wrote, it didn't sound like you understood any of it. Maybe you should elaborate more from the start?

> But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.

You're wrong.

1. Craigslist killed two companies in the process. The worse part is that if Craigslist only listened to its users and improved their website, none of this would have even happened.

2. Now any company can stop anyone from fair use of their content. All they have to do is accuse them of Craigslists' definition of hacking under the CFAA. e.g. news sites can now potentially threaten companies like Google with the CFAA for listing their articles on Google News

3. Maybe if the scraping led to an outright copy of Craigslist's listing content I can understand. However, they were transforming that content into something more (something that Craigslist refused to do on their own site for years), kind of what Google does with search results. Moreover they were linking back to the original post (attribution).

4. Just because there's a term or clause in a TOS, it doesn't mean that it's legal.

5. The main result from this is to help maintain the entrenchment of the status quo which hurts overall innovation.

Really we should start here: are you familiar with Fair Use?

[jasonkester]

> Craigslist killed two companies

... but they didn't. Those two companies killed themselves by building their entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to use.

And it's not like they were led to believe that the data was usable. It was clearly marked as not usable, for the exact purpose they used it for.

It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the internet, it's fair game to use. But it's not. Thankfully.

Chances are we're both wrong (you legally and me libertarianally). But the only thing we've established here is that we disagree.

[chaostheory]

> Those two companies killed themselves

I disagree. You're implying that Craigslist was passive, and they were just watching from the sidelines. They weren't. They sued.

> building their entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to use.

This is our main point of contention, and we'll probably just agree to disagree.

> It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the internet, it's fair game to use.

imo it depends on how you use it. Unless I misunderstood something, if we had it your way we wouldn't even be able to write wikipedia articles based on data gleaned from online content even with attribution unless the owner gives permission

[tptacek]

This is a deeply inaccurate summary of what actually happened, but it's understandable why you'd write it, because it's the same manipulative framing Techdirt chose.

[chaostheory]

ok what's inaccurate?

[raesene5]

Err, you saw the bit where it's not Craigslist's money that's being donated, but the settlement that they got from 3Taps right?

And the bit where a very dubious interpretation of the CFAA which is opposed by the EFF was used as the legal basis to sue 3Taps...