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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Does the chick down the street selling her old couch really care about exclusive rights or not? Not anymore than I care about the lubricant used on the subway wheels. I just want to get there cheaply and quickly and that chick just wants to sell her couch. The HN community is a very tiny subset of the population and our views often have little corespondence to those of muggles.

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She doesn't think she does, but if she lists that couch on ebay as well she is technically in breach of craigslist's terms of service, and if they decide to enforce it then she is going to be forced to care.

Not that I expect them to actually try to enforce it in that way, of course.

"...if she lists that couch on ebay as well she is technically in breach of craigslist's terms of service."

No, I do not think that has anything to do with the new craiglist terms of service. The new terms of service just prevents other people from copying the content of the craigslist ad.

So, no the hypothetical woman selling the couch would not be affected by the new terms in any way.

I wonder if there's a market for a rewriting service ... takes a volume of text, and rewrites it using different words so that it's the same content, but not copied.

Such software exists. It's called a spinner. Unfortunately, AFAIK it doesn't actually get around the copyright issues because it's a mechanical translation, not an independent creative work.

interesting, didn't know there was already a little cottage industry here. I'm totally not advocating it, but I'm curious how would anyone know (assuming the spinner actually outputs quality copy)? I guess it would be up to to the prosecution to prove it, or the defense to lie about it, should it come to that.

It's mainly used for various kinds of black hat SEO (comment spam, automatically generating thousand-page websites and so on). From what I've seen, the quality ranges from atrocious (e.g. simply running random words through a thesaurus) to passable, but the goal is just to make the text look reasonably unique to a machine, not to skirt copyright law. If you were given the output and a list of potential source texts, you would not have any trouble figuring out which was the parent.

Wouldn't that be prohibited as "preparing derivative works"?

Wouldn't that still be a derivative work? I know the AP considers it so.

>> The new terms of service just prevents other people from copying the content of the craigslist ad.

Um...

>> the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent

Where does it say anything about "other people?" I mean, I doubt Craigslist would sue an actual user for posting on EBay, but they might send EBay a takedown notice for that content.

And if I wrote a piece of software that helped you post the same thing simultaneously on Craigslist and EBay, I bet they'd sue me.

Interesting point, I believe PadLister can simultaniously post to CL and PM, which may now violate this as well.

And if I wrote a piece of software that helped you post the same thing simultaneously on Craigslist and EBay, I bet they'd sue me.

That's not what this is about. CL doesn't care where you post it, or how many times you post it. CL just doesn't want others scraping their website and posting it for you. This is direct action on CL against Padmapper.

That's great and grand that you've decided that's what they mean. That's not what the forced license grant actually says.

How will CL know that an identical ad on CL and another site wasn't scraped, but just double posted by the author? Do you really think CL is just going to politely ask?

They aren't going to care about one or two or even 100. When the majority of Padmapper's listings were scraped from CL, that is how we end up with this ToS change. CL told them to knock it off, so Padmapper did an end-around thinking they were ok. CL still didn't think it was kosher so they tightened up their ToS to effectively close the loophole.

Do you really think CL is just going to politely ask?

They can politely ask the poster and see if they posted it elsewhere. If yes, nothing else needs to be done. If no, they are probably going to find out the extent the external website has gone to.

Since when does eBay scrape and serve up Craigslist ads? Has there been some news that eBay is going to start doing this?

The "work" is the content as it appears on Craigslist. CL doesn't have exclusive right to the selling of the object, just the content of the ads people post to CL.

No, the new terms of service may be intended to prevent other people from copying content, but what matters is what's written in the contract, not what the press release says. What the terms of service actually do is grant Craigslist the same license an author grants a publisher -- you can't grant Random House exclusive rights, then turn around and self-publish electronically.

You may be happy to rely on vague "oh, we don't actually enforce that clause" but some of us prefer not to sign away rights for nothing.

I'm sure Craigslist is counting on nobody bothering to read the fine print. As long as they don't start enforcing the clause on individuals there won't be any outcry outside of tech circles, and nobody's going to notice the difference. If you refuse to sign away your rights on principle you'll just be locking yourself out of the market.

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