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Comment by Zimahl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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