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by tptacek 4003 days ago
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.
4 comments
mcherm 4003 days ago
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....

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amyjess 4003 days ago
> 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.

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gergles 4003 days ago
No, they weren't. 3taps was scraping Google, not CL.
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slavik81 4003 days ago
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.

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tptacek 4003 days ago
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.

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3am 4003 days ago
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.

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