Judge Throws Out Craigslist Copyright Lawsuit, But It Can Still Sue Over Data

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/craigslist-3taps-lawsuit-decision/

by devinfoley • 13 years ago

35 13 13 years ago

eksith2• 13 years ago

Craigslist's advantage is that it's one of the most well known; not that it came up with the listings idea by itself (papers have had these ads for ages). Their lawsuit angle was that this was a question of "method" which isn't unique.

Aggregation, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely since that's essentially scraping the listings data.

rcfox3• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what "gaining unauthorized access to data on its Web site" means in this case?

If you're posting links to the content on your site (I roll my eyes at this condition, but there's the AT&T case, so I added it), and there's no login screen in front of the data, is there any expectation of privacy for the data?

eksith2• 13 years ago

I'm guessing scraping was a no-no. Unlike a search engine, which shows excerpts pertaining to the block of searched text, a lot of these services displayed the entire content of the listing.

What was ruled here is that they don't have an exclusive right to user-generated content, however other sites simply can't spider and re-list all the entries. That's essentially a mirror of Craigslist not on Craigslist.

rcfox3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how it works in the US, but in Canada, you can't copyright raw data. (ie: data that has no creative value) So it's legal to, for instance, "scrape" the contents of a phone book into another format.

If I understand correctly, Padmapper was scraping location, and pricing information, which is raw data. So even though they're scraping that data, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that.

underdown• 13 years ago

technically google shows both a cache of your pages and a visual representation of your site directly on google.com without explicit permission.

signed02• 13 years ago

Towards the end they weren't even accessing the data through Craigslist. They were scraping Google Search results for Craigslist entries.

timtamboy63• 13 years ago

Just start charging for an API and everyone's happy

will_work4tears• 13 years ago

No kidding, they could probably make so much more money this way.

Judge Throws Out Craigslist Copyright Lawsuit, But It Can Still Sue Over Data

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