I bet if the button were changed to just cut/paste an html link to <city>.craigslist.org/post all would be well.
This is just CL trying to keep their postings exclusive to their website of which they've spent many a time and money trying to build and brand.
The difference being it is it would be a Craigslist post I wrote and would contain photos I took. Those words came from my head, so are you saying Craigslist owns the copyright to them as soon as I submit the ad and thus I cannot post that content elsewhere?
As the article said, Krrb is not scraping or even visiting Craigslist. The data gets to Krrb on the volition of the user who posted to Craigslist.
How does Krrb verify this? How does Krrb ensure that it's the post's author, and not some random bot hitting executing their javascript in an effort to scam users?
> Craigslist owns the copyright to them as soon as I submit the ad and thus I cannot post that content elsewhere?
You absolutely have that right. It's your data, you can re-post it wherever you like. However, Krrb does not have the right to scrape data from Craigslist, on your say-so.
The content was posted to Craigslist with a license for Craigslist to publish it, not for Krrb. Much like a book author gives up certain rights to distribute a book through a publisher (including where and when it's published), the user is giving up certain rights to post the content on Craigslist. Whether this is a bad thing or not is up to the author of the content, not a 3rd party to decide.
If I write an ad for a chair I want to sell, I should be able to post it to Craigslist and any other site I want to. The Krrb button is no different than the user manually copying and pasting her own content into Krrb's posting form.
It's important to note that Krrb and Padmapper both make the distinction that they're scraping facts, not posts. One is copyrightable, the other is not.
You can lay claim to the sentence "I have a room in a 2-bedroom apartment for rent in Williamsburg, going for $1500"
But you do not have the right to own the fact that there's a room for rent in Williamsburg, in a 2-bedroom, for $1500. It would seem that Krrb and Padmapper both scrape the facts only, not textual content - or at least, that's what the letter seems to say.
This is a frequent misunderstanding of the Padmapper issue. Padmapper never scraped posts wholesale from Craigslist - it scraped and displayed only structured data (i.e. facts), and in fact if you wanted to contact the seller it links you directly to the Craigslist post!
Craigslist can only litigate on that basis because they know Krrb doesn't have the means to defend themselves. That's not a public good.
But padmapper is clearly leveraging Craiglist's infrastructure for padmapper’s own benefit. I find that difficult to defend.
Making the user press a button then automatically copy/paste the url is bad.
Got it.
Cutting / pasting content from CL: bad.
Cutting / pasting a post URL from CL: good.