Craigslist's Allegations Of "Copyright" Violations Thrown Out
forbes.com
forbes.com
1. The individual posts were copyrightable
2. The compilation (whose only creativity is being organized by geographic area), was copyrightable (because "“deciding which categories to include and under what name,”" met the minimal level of creativity necessary for copyright)
3. Craigslist's eventually lost the copyright claims because the TOU was not an exclusive license (in the US, only an exclusive rights owner can sue for infringement, licensesees cannot)
4. Craigslist did not need to register the actual posts it's suing over, only the compilation
#1 is maybe right (i think it depends on the post)
#2 should be clearly wrong, though there is a bit of bad precedent here
#3 is good, but the judge basically suggested with the right set of words buried in the terms of use, craigslist could have transferred copyright. This is actually really dangerous in practice (you want people to know exactly what they are getting into), because you really want copyright transfers to be clear and knowing by users, and buried somewhere in a separate TOU document, plus a button says "by clicking you accept the TOU", shouldn't be enough.
Of course, this is just a preliminary decision based on minimal briefing, so i'm hopeful the judge would have gotten it "righter" had those claims not been dismissed.
#4 is probably wrong, in the sense that registering "craigslist.org" as a compilation, should not count as registering all the works that have ever appeared on craigslist.org.
At best, it should be registering the works that appeared as of the copyright registration date for craigslist.org.
The compilation registered in 2012 is titled "Craigslist website 2012 (Homepage and primary supporting pages)"
That should not be "all posts". There are also two compilation registrations for post.craigslist.org, one in 2004, one in 2008.
None of these should be sufficient to claim what they did.
In determining facial plausibility, whether a complaint states a plausible claim is a “context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.” Id. at 679. Allegations of material fact are taken as true and construed in the light most favorable to the non-moving party. http://3taps.com/images/pics/430_138734862-Judge-rules-in-fa...
So essentially these findings are made while reading all facts in the best possible light for craigslist. So it's not necessarily saying, for example, that the compilation is copyrightable - just that it is conceivable that it could be.
Wow, that is quite a way to open an article! Isn't journalism supposed to be slightly more neutral than that. I understand that most of us (myself included) are quite against copyrighting, DRM and closed source etc. but let's not harshly rebuke a company with 30 employees [1]. Simply put, copyright is a contract between the society and an individual that encourages the individual to create, innovate and be artistic. Craigslist did things that they thought were right to protect their users' and their own interests. They found a market. Padmapper used their data. Courts said it is ok to do so since they didn't the copyright to begin with. Fine, let's move on.
No reason to write such a bitter sounding article peppered with "Let this be a lesson to all tech companies", "hopefully this will discourage craigslist", and "sledgehammer to scare innovators". tsk. tsk. Forbes.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/republican-staffe...
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-law-...
[2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/02/25/white-hou...
Also, the specific reason the copyright claims were dismissed in this case is that craigslist does not have an exclusive license on its posts. If Hacker News' terms exclusively license comments (which I doubt, but I haven't checked), that would make this particular ruling less relevant. It is also possible that the comments' authors could make claims against you, should they wish to do so.
I genuinely wonder this. Can I say, "it's OK for XYZ to scrape, but not ABC?" (Or is it general use -- scraping OK/not OK?)
I think it's different for API usage, because you enter an agreement with an entity by signing up, etc. I'm speaking specifically to the unauthenticated scraping/indexing.
That said, once I've given it to you, if you choose to give it to someone else, I have no claim against that someone (although I might against you, depending on our contract). That's the heart of 3taps' position as I understand it; they get craigslist post data from third party sources like search engines, instead of scraping craigslist, and so do not have a contract with craigslist.
What about "anonymous" scraping, however? (I put it in quotes because I know you can reverse DNS/UserAgent/etc. identify... but that's simple to spoof, and we're discussing within a sophisticated context.)
Can I say that "OOgle" can use my data (because I want visitors) but others can't? (To complicate, can I exclude only certain, specified, parties and include all others?)
To clarify, my meaning was that among the various potential legal impediments to scraping and displaying website contents, this judgement would set precedent for copyright only, if anything.
Looks like Derek found a sweet new gig after being kicked off the Republican Study Committee for talking sense about copyright.
The internet works the way it is now because of the concept of 'free and open' information. Attempting to harm the ones that enable such open-ness isn't exactly the right recipe for a long term successful Internet based business model.
Currently both buyers as well as sellers have been trained that the place to go is Craigslist. Give that it would be impossible for a new service to have anywhere near the number of buyers and sellers as Craigslist, no rational individual is going to choose an alternative.
The problem becomes even tricker since Craigslist is for the most part free. They currently use the revenue gained by job postings to subsidize the other listings on their site. This makes it harder for a niche service to start up as they are competing with free.
Afai recall, CL is being pushed into corners by people who desperately want to eat it alive.
Further - users like CL. As much as people wax on about how features and a UI will make a big difference, fact is that in its geography people don't really care about that.
There's also a chart out there showing that CL is being disrupted, in that several silos its present in have alternate service providers.
I must further point out that the ideological posturing at the end assumes that the next firm who comes in, and adds yet another middleman to the chain, will let the data be free and open.
Should they end up consuming/transitioning most of CLs base, who is to say they won't institute a lock in of some sort.
And a YC firm definitely can't operate on the same budgetary and revenue constraints CL imposes on itself.
New shiny is emphatically not needed here.
Notoriously difficult to dethrone. Craigslist being such a piece of crap for so long is an object lesson in the power of network effects.
"(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent."
So the standard TOS at the bottom of a page would not be okay to transfer copyright.
According to the decision, craigslist moved to a click-through eventually.