Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

> I would respect you more if you just came out and said "fuck Craigslist, we're using their data"

The material facts of a listing on Craigslist don't belong to Craigslist. You can't copyright the fact that a given listing is for $2400 a month. You can't copyright that it's at a given street and cross-street and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms on the premises. I don't even think anyone should copyright the aggregate of the above data. To do so would be evil. (In that there would be widespread implications.)

It's not their data. It's their listing. Those are two different things.

Are you saying that Craigslist doesn't own the data, but it still owns the aggregation of the data?

View on HN

I have no real skepticism that what Padmapper is doing is legal, and Craigslist doesn't own that data in any legal sense. Sure.

But once you get down to arguing "yes, I have a legal right to use this data, as your attorney can see by looking at section VI.A.5.b of the Online Bullshit Act," you've already given up the game. Legal arguments are ones that are essentially saying "I have government violence backing me up." Padmapper likely does.

But if that's what it's coming down to, it doesn't change the fact that Craigslist is being screwed. Maybe they had it coming and maybe it's good for the grand moral arc of human history, but whatever: they provided the forum and a way to structure and organize all that data, and without that structure it'd be hard to pick out the signal from the noise of the internet.

> Legal arguments are ones that are essentially saying "I have government violence backing me up."

I am not arguing from that standpoint. I'm thinking about the implications for the freedom of data.

You are essentially saying that anyone who has done work resulting in the aggregation of public data somehow "owns" or holds the rights to the aggregation of that data. By this same logic, the first company that published a general-interest encyclopedia would own the general concept of the same aggregation of data. That can't be right, otherwise there could only be one encyclopedia in the world. By the same token, the current search companies own the reference graph of the web, and anyone who starts another web crawler is in violation.

In so far as what Padmapper is doing is the re-aggregation of already public data, he has to be in the clear, otherwise the concept of "owning" an aggregation of data becomes restrictive.

In this case, just like in most cases about freedom to use information, a legal argument means the opposite: rather than saying that they have government violence to back then up, PadMapper is saying that Craigslist doesn't. In the absence of any sort of enforcement, Craigslist would not be able to do much about people's using their data, after all.

Now, I'm not commenting on whether their behavior is justified or not; I'm merely talking about the role of the government in this particular case.

How would Padmapper be using "government violence" when they successfully counterargue Craigslist's attempt to use "government violence" against them, resulting in no damage to Craigslist?

> Legal arguments are ones that are essentially saying "I have government violence backing me up."

Even if this phrase served your larger argument regarding Craigslist's moral position -- and I don't think it does, given that thus far, Craigslist is really the first to threaten to make this a matter requiring state enforcement -- it'd still be a bit mixed up.

A legal argument -- like any other argument -- can be about persuasion based on established principles instead of compulsion. In fact, that's essentially all it is through the point the parties involved are subject to an arbiter whose decision is still essentially based in the relative persuasiveness of the arguments.

It's true that at the stage where a ruling is either ignored by an unhappy party or enforced by another party, violence of one form or another may be required (if there is to be a system where there's enforcement -- and not all systems choose this). But between that point and the "legal argument" stage, there's enough of a buffer zone grounded in discussion that any easy equivalence between the argument and violence itself should make a careful thinker suspicious.

In the US, Craig's List doesn't have a copyright claim on the data or the aggregation of data (known as a database right; a separate copyright assignable for the compilation of data, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow).

In the UK and EU, database rights do exist, although Padmapper could argue that Craig's List makes no investment in actually compiling the database since listings are user submitted (as opposed to the investment they continually make keeping the database accessible).

Prices are in-fact copyrightable (for example most stock exchanges legally enforce this) as they do meet the creative requirement of copyright.

What? Cite? A quick Google seems to show the opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com