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Comment by willrobinson | Hacker News Reader

The more Sherman Act claims that are brought against web incumbents, the sooner one is going to stick.

The CL blog stinks of entitlement.

Craigslist "stole" the classifieds business from local newspapers. Now they are accusing others of trying to "steal" the "CL idea" from them.

I am one of (probably) the few who actually prefer a CL type interface. But the way CL is behaving in the face of competition is just embarassing. If someone wants to reshape the data, then you have to let them. The data is not the property of CL. If users do not want their data on some other site, then that's their issue to raise, not CL's.

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Craigslist has never sued anyone for reimplementing their 'idea'.

Craigslist didn't 'steal' the classifieds business, I recall no point in time which I could find the classifieds in my news paper copied verbatim onto craigslist.

Craigslist offered a solution which was superior to newspapers and built a business around it.

As to who holds copyright on the data that's a question for the courts that is currently undecided, if it was cut and dried as to who held copyright on the the data then summary judgement would have already been filed.

I don't think craigslist holds exclusive copyright on the data so in my mind they may lack standing as whether 3taps is allowed to use the data becomes an issue between 3taps and millions of other users, perhaps a class action suit is more appropriate.

"stole" and "steal" and "CL idea" are all in quotes for a reason. Here, quotes are intended to signify the words quoted do not necessarily carry their dictionary meanings. They carry whatever meaning you assign to them. And that is what you have done. To you, "steal" means verbatim copying. But I might have assigned a different meaning, or maybe the same one. It's a figure of speech.

As for summary judgment, I think you mean _granting_ of summary judgment, not _filing_. But I'm not going to split hairs on the words you used. I know what you meant, even if it wasn't technically correct.

If we're going to have a serious discussion, let's not put quotes around things and have different interpretations. Let's state exactly what we mean and talk about it.

You'd need to show that CL copied ads from newspapers in order to attract traffic, and I don't believe that's the case. taking away market share and scraping someone's website for content are vastly different things.

"stole" market share. You got it. "[S]tole" was just a figure of speech. And that is in fact what meant by stole.

re: scraping. This is something that has come before the courts a few times (I'm thinking Ebay and a few others; although it might have been called "crawling"). Do you think CL can win on a claim of "scraping"?

Yes, they probably can. Read those actual cases. In particular, in the cases where the scraper/crawler won, read why they won.

Have you read the CL complaint?

But when giving away an exclusive license, as CL requires, you aren't allowed to run the same content in both the newspaper and CL, right?

I have always wondered about running a similar listing somewhere else first, then running something lightly edited on Craigslist, sending their registered agent, by registered mail, a note that the exclusive license applies only to the relatively minor editorial changes applied.... I wonder how fast such would get delisted....

Do you think most people listing ads on CL read the terms and understand them as you did? (Or were the terms confusing?) Are CL's terms different from what one would normally expect from a newspaper? That is, would you expect that the newspaper would require an exclusive license and prohibit you from running your ad anywhere else?

Yes, they are. Normally if someone wants an exclusive right to content they pay the producer for them. Virtually everyone else asks for a non-exclusive license. This is very different and has been discussed here on HN before.

And didn't CL change their terms (excl-->nonexcl) after some blogger posted about them? And didn't they make some changes to their site (collaborate with a maps provider so users can now get geo mappings) after filing this lawsuit? I've already forgotten now. This case just seems laughable to me. But what do I know.

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