Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150701/14150431519/no-craig-newmark-did-not-donate-to-eff-he-helped-make-cfaa-worse-instead.shtml

by peter123 • 11 years ago

312 170 11 years ago

techdirt.com

lotharbot• 11 years ago

Previous discussion of CL's suit against 3taps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034

The court ruling is at http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi... and is surprisingly readable.

justonepost3• 11 years ago

Craigslist had to sue or otherwise anyone could scrap data from Craigslist, whether they were making "Craigslist more valuable" or not. Simple as that.

geofft4• 11 years ago

I'm not caught up on this case, but,

1. Why is that? I think the most relevant field of US law with that sort of provision is trademark law, which shouldn't have been at issue here at all (3taps and Padmapper were not pretending to be Craigslist or authorized by Craigslist). Copyright law, which is sorta relevant, does not have such a provision. If your song gets pirated, you can sue only the pirates named Fred without losing your right to sue. The CFAA, which is definitely relevant here, does not have such a provision: JSTOR does not have their hands full with CFAA cases against everyone who ever sent an article to a colleague or friend.

2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? That would have sidestepped any such concern, without setting a precedent that everyone else must get API access. I think it's pretty clear from this case that they did not want to see Padmapper exist, and regardless of whether they were obligated to sue and try to shut them down, they clearly wanted to sue and shut this particular application down.

teacup504• 11 years ago

2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper?

Maybe they didn't want to?

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

I don't think people are really arguing that part. Well Techdirt is a bit with the whole whining about "b-b-but 3taps was making CL more valuable" as if that mattered (apart from being open to interpretation).

The issue is that CL and this judge have set a precedent (I think?) that private companies can make up felonies by deciding what "authorized access" is.

You wanna sue a business for scraping your site? Hey, fine, that's a civil business issue. (And really, there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways. Or at least there should be some level of malicious intent required.) Trying to use a law with criminal/felony penalties is grossly out-of-line.

sangnoir5• 11 years ago

there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways.

Are you sure about that? So you don't want any legal recourse for someone that overloads your API/web servers with thousands of requests per second? You might say a technical solution (like rate limiting) would do - but that will cost you time & money with no upside, and can be easily circumvented (use many clients in parallel with the same effect - hammering your server and increasing your costs)

I think a law for that is fine, as a last resort. It will keep people at their best behaviour.

tedunangst2• 11 years ago

You wanna sue a business for scraping your site? Hey, fine, that's a civil business issue. ... Trying to use a law with criminal/felony penalties is grossly out-of-line.

And the CFAA also happens to be the law that makes it a civil business issue, thanks to the 1030(g) section that was amended in 1996. Wikipedia has elected to make no mention of this section, but other sources do.

http://www.balch.com/files/Publication/01d78bb1-08f4-4a25-8c...

"Section 1030(g) expressly provides the civil remedy (and thus federal court subject matter jurisdiction) for violation of the CFAA"

rurounijones• 11 years ago

Cynical part of me sees all the people saying "EFF should give it back to show integrity" and wondering if that wasn't the hope all along from craigslist.

I would hope that EFF does not give it back but uses it to continue the good fight or donate it to another, unrelated, charity if they believe the money is tainted.

justonepost3• 11 years ago

Everyone is just frustrated that Craigslist charges so little for their services and hasn't tried to monetize it in some abuse way like a typical capitalistic company would.

MichaelCrawford9• 11 years ago

Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days.

I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent.

Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring.

In the long run I want to cover every occupation in which one can find a job by applying through the employer's website.

I won't monetize it in any way. Or perhaps I could say I will monetize it by offering my consulting services through my website, as I always have. Providing free content on my site results in sales leads.

justonepost3• 11 years ago

Craigslist is a very cool company. They are basically a communistic approach to the internet. I say all the more power to them. If someone can do better than free, go right ahead.

Alex3917• 11 years ago

I don't know the specific facts of this case, but the communistic element has been at the center of some similar cases. Anyone is/was allowed to use Craigslist data to make apps as long as they aren't doing it for profit. And every year people agree to these terms, but later get their access yanked when they decide to start running display ads or whatever.

onedev2• 11 years ago

Someone CAN do it better AND for free.

Check out Nextdoor.com. I've been using it for a while and it's better in literally every single way. It's now just a matter of time while they scale.

kimmel• 11 years ago

Just tried out nextdoor.com. It tried to load 6 different tracking and marketing scripts that my browser addons blocked. Craigslist has 0. I will not be using nextdoor.

geofft4• 11 years ago

Have you used Padmapper? It was better than free. It was much nicer than Craigslist for the same queries, but -- because of Craigslist's size and entrenched position -- the data largely remained on Craigslist, despite Padmapper also having a free posting interface. That might be fair business, but it certainly wasn't a fair comparison of their products or philosophies.

Your analogy of communism may be entirely too apt, given how communism played out in practice last century. Sure, you got the overthrow of the capitalist economy, but if you were a tiny country who didn't really want to agree with Moscow on everything, sucks to be you.

MichaelCrawford9• 11 years ago

The Molotov Cocktail was invented by the Finnish in honor of the Soviet minister who initiated the USSR's invasion of their "tiny country".

whyenot• 11 years ago

I used PadMapper. It was fantastic, the user interface was so much better than CL. ...but its scraping of CL postings was risky and morally wrong. The "fuck the rules" approach has worked for Uber and AirBNB, but it's not going to work everywhere.

methehack5• 11 years ago

Communist as in it's all mine? It seems like the means of production here is the data they 'publish' and they've been very clear who the owners of that are -- craigslist and no one else.

Their aggressively litigious nature makes it difficult for others to compete and provide better services. It's difficult to penetrate the network effect juggernaut if you can't scrape their existing ads.

beedogs2• 11 years ago

"Aggressively litigious nature"? Really? Because this is the first lawsuit I'm aware of involving CL, and they were clearly in the right here. So ... what's your beef?

makomk3• 11 years ago

For a while they even changed their terms of service to give themselves an exclusive license to anything you posted on the site in order to help them sue websites that let you search it without their permission - so in theory they could've sued their own users for posting the same ads on Craigslist and elsewhere. That's fucking insane.

em3rgent0rdr3• 11 years ago

"All you posts are belong to CRAIGSLIST" is not very communistic. Craigslist is just a private business using government IP law to prevent potential competitors from eating their significant market share.

"If someone can do better than free, go right ahead."

It's hard to compete with an entity that uses the coercive power of the state to squash you.

methehack5• 11 years ago

Craigslist is a great example of how network effects can be leveraged to form the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage. The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users. Newmark knows this and that's why he sues anyone who sniffs in the general direction of his data. I think he's a self-serving fink.

jacobolus• 11 years ago

The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users

The product is bare bones, but it works just as well as it ever has, which is a heck of a lot better than many web applications from the last 10 years, loaded down with animations and piles of tracking javascript and auto-playing video ads and broken reimplementations of standard browser features.

Personally I find it works better for me than most google web properties since about 2008 (e.g. the new versions of gmail and google maps), better than recent versions of facebook, better than yelp, better than a lot of current newspaper websites, etc. There’s something to be said for plain html websites.

I do wish craigslist would let other people scrape their pages and provide alternative user interfaces though. Pad mapper was a great help when I needed to look for an apartment several years ago.

methehack5• 11 years ago

I'll grant you that the basic functionality works. It ought to given that they've barely changed it in like 15 years. It's fine if they don't want to change it, but they've stifled -- through legal channels -- many frustrated attempts to enhance the product -- like cease and desists to dude's doing simple mapping visualizations for example. I think they're bullies with their position and it has served no one but craigslist. The network effects they wield create monopoly-like conditions and they use the court's to retain them.

[edit for grammar which alas is not quite perfect yet]

teacup504• 11 years ago

What's so embarrassing, exactly?

It doesn't follow the latest web9.0 flat^Wmaterial^Wlook-a-monkey! design trends?

The interface remains usably utilitarian?

They don't try to capitalize to create an uber-exit that everyone can write a congratulatory comment on YC/TechCrunch about? Great hustle Craig!

Or is it just that you're of the Uber-style ethical camp that believes in disruption-through-cost-externalization? In this case, actively extracting value from Craigslist, despite their protests, and using it to undermine their business.

methehack5• 11 years ago

For the record, I'm a fan of the retro design -- or I guess it's original in their case. In any case, I don't mind that.

It's that the product could be better -- as in better features -- in a bout a million ways. How about notifying me when something becomes available for instance... Or showing a map view of apartment listings or heck all listings... Or a bit a zillion search possibilities...like -- here's one -- searching across a whole region or farther for a given item... Or some kind of attempt at reputation building as an option...

That list took maybe 90 seconds... My theory is that they are lazy because they can afford to be and they aggressively defend their laziness by suing anyone who tries to make it better. Finks.

unethical_ban2• 11 years ago

They have made lots of functional changes in the past two years. Better image presentation; more sorts and filters specific to the category browsed. But before 2013 or so, it really was a POS 2000-era site. craiglook and padmapper, and others that put useful UIs over the dataset, did a real service to the platform and Craigslist destroys them.

TechieKid• 11 years ago

Did you read TFA? They always directed users back to the original Craigslist posting, ergo, not undermining CL's business.

hueving• 11 years ago

How is Uber disrupting through cost externalization? They disrupt through regulatory arbitrage. They aren't dumping costs onto society.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users.

Have you checked CL personals lately? All you'll find are chirping crickets.

pbreit2• 11 years ago

Have you ever wondered if its "embarrassing-ness" is partly (or more) responsible for its long term success?

tptacek11• 11 years ago

If you're an entrepreneur, I would respectfully suggest you worry a little bit about the thought pattern that would make you say that Craigslist's "product" is an "embarrassment" and that it "has users simply because it has users".

Craigslist's product is its userbase. It is by all accounts a fabulously successful product.

You want be able to see past the AngularJS and D3 and iOS-first and responsive UX stuff to the meat of what a real value proposition is. You don't want to be held hostage to fashion.

res0nat0r4• 11 years ago

Can't we just ban Techdirt submissions for their terrible and obviously biased reporting? Everything from them is blatantly one sided and not even trying to actually represent the truth.

From 3Taps own website right now:

"As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, which supported 3taps' position on the CFAA in this litigation, and continues to do great work for Internet freedom"

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

That doesn't sound like a "donation", though? At the very least Craiglist tried to portray it as something they're doing out of the goodness of their hearts.

res0nat0r4• 11 years ago

Giving million bucks to someone else sounds pretty good to me and fits every definition of donation I've ever heard of.

teacup504• 11 years ago

Giving away a $1M settlement is clearly a donation, and it's "out of the goodness of their hearts" when compared to the obvious alternative: keeping the money.

lmm3• 11 years ago

I'm sure Craigslist could have negotiated for a settlement that would have involved money (perhaps less money) going directly to them. And if Craigslist had done nothing the EFF wouldn't be getting any money. So they deserve at least some of the credit.

IBM• 11 years ago

Techdirt's usual bias fits in-line with HN's bias so that doesn't seem likely.

dang3• 11 years ago

Techdirt is in a category of sites whose submissions are penalized by default on HN. This category is for sources that produce a lot of fluff but also the occasionally substantive piece. There are various ways for the penalty to be lifted, one of which is moderator review, which is how it got lifted here.

Your description might be fair in general, but this article is more substantive than the typical riler-upper. If you know of something that it misrepresents, by all means correct the record. But it doesn't misrepresent the info you quoted—on the contrary, it communicates it clearly and includes the exact same quote.

crusso• 11 years ago

I found the article to be misleading and of pretty poor journalistic quality. It reads like a rant and I would hope that HN would not make an exception for a Techdirt rant.

For example: the line, "Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he's giving his own money to EFF" was especially confusing since the proceeds of a lawsuit are in fact "his own money".

tptacek11• 11 years ago

2nd graf: suggests Craigslist "abused" the CFAA to "kill" a company. Instead, Craigslist relied on the one private cause of action in the US code specific to enforcement of ToS's --- a limited cause, with limited damages. It was inaccurate to call this an "abuse" (it's the whole intent of 1030g!) and misleading to invoke the CFAA boogeyman over it.

4th graf: Claims Craigslist relied on a "tortured" definition of CFAA, linking to another Techdirt story about a judge's upholding of Craigslist's claims on two different counts. "Torturous" here means "the suggestion that access was unauthorized after Padmapper received a cease and desist from Craigslist's lawyers, and changed IP addresses to evade a ban.

6th graf: Techdirt grossly misrepresents Orin Kerr, perhaps assuming readers won't click through to the Volokh story they quote out of context. Kerr sees the ruling as a missed opportunity to more rigidly define "unauthorized access" as "circumvention of technical controls" but does not disagree with the ruling. HN readers in general would not be happier in a world where Kerr's view of the CFAA was reliably enforced.

Most importantly, I think: the article also never makes the argument it teases in its headline: at no point is it ever made clear how Newmark has "made the CFAA worse".

This is a defect density rate worthy of early-period PHP Wordpress.

Your normal instinct about Techdirt is almost always going to be right. It's not a good site. I'm glad it's penalized. Penalize it more.

pdkl95• 11 years ago

biased reporting

The idea that "unbiased" reporting exists is a modern myth. There is bias in simply deciding the topic to report on.

The modern idea that "unbiased" is somehow a virtue just leads to the CNN phenomenon where every story has to have two sides regardless of what the situation actually is.

One of the purposes of journalism is to make the decisions about what is "news" and what is junk. Obviously these criteria are going to depend on a lot of personal interpretation, so the key to good reporting is to know and understand how the reporter judges a story - their bias - so their reporting can be properly weighted.

In this sense, techdirt is quite open an obvious with their bias, and is fairly consistent in style, which is something I wish I saw a lot more at "news" websites.

(how you interpret that bias is another matter entirely)

As for their content, while I agree techdirt can be one sided at times, I have never seen any serious lies, either direct or by omission. Maybe I've just missed them?

Speaking of which, I don't see how reposting a quote that was included in the techdirt article is supposed to be evidence of them being "one sided" or "not even trying to actually represent the truth".

downandout• 11 years ago

Even if CL's interpretation of the CFAA is legally correct, this is an abuse of it by any measure. Suing people for accessing your publicly available website is absurd. The fact that Craig would publicly claim the money was a donation, after he obtained it by exploiting a very dangerous view of the CFAA and bankrupted a company that didn't do anything wrong, is disgusting to me. I've always found Craig Newmark to be a little creepy; now I think he's squarely in scumbag territory.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

Imagine if someone had sued Google for basically doing the same thing back in 1998. Would it exist today? Would we have this great quality search engine that has made our lives so much easier?

res0nat0r4• 11 years ago

Since everyone here liked the Padmapper UI over Craigslist they were OK with what they were doing, but if this was happening to an HN friendly business the story would be entirely different and there would a massive outcry. The hypocrisy is at least to me highly entertaining.

lmm3• 11 years ago

Maybe we'd still be using something opt-in like Yahoo Directory, and maybe the web would be better for it. Yahoo directory was slower but in many ways higher-quality; it would've kept the web more decentralized (e.g. Wikipedia would not be the top result for half of queries). Of course there would have been short-term costs to that route.

tptacek11• 11 years ago

Google in fact does honor requests not to scrape websites, and honors them at Internet scale. Padmapper could, meanwhile, reasonably be defined by their unwillingness to stop scraping a single site whose lawyers made it clear they did not want to be scraped. So I'm not sure your comparison is valid.

belorn• 11 years ago

Why is it absurd to first withdraw permission to publicly accessible service and then sue if the individual continues unauthorized?

I can easily imagine a public irc channel that ip blocks abusing users that post goatse links (not illegal in itself). If some of those users than bypass that block, is it unreasonable that the owner would want to sue in order to stop the abuse from the then unauthorized access to the irc server?

slavik812• 11 years ago

To me, I think the difference is that the guy posting goatse links is causing actual harm, while the guy scraping the website may have basically no impact. Only cases where there are actually meaningful damages should end up in court.

tokenizerrr• 11 years ago

Yes, that is absolutely unreasonable. Instead the irc channel should be set to +m and voice given to non-abusing users.

eli2• 11 years ago

It's reasonable that the owner can sue. But you don't need CFAA to sue someone and it opens the door to serious criminal penalties which, no I do not think are reasonable for an IRC troll or for a Craigslist mapping tool.

noja• 11 years ago

So if I make a public website, you get to re-use the content on it however you like? Err, no.

jnbiche• 11 years ago

So sue on that basis, not on accessing the website.

I think most of us are not so unhappy about the suing, although we may disagree with it. We're very unhappy about using CFAA, which passes the line into criminal penalties. So we're talking about initiating a process against someone who scraped your site that could land them in jail.

marincounty• 11 years ago

He's not "creepy". That word has just become too cute? Its been so overused by gossipy people? I not implying you're gossipy--I'm just tired of overused words that come into fashion: "Really?", "Dude","tool", "noob", "tldr", "Hipster", and every expression that turns into a cliché?

I've never met the man, but he seems to respect money? He doesn't look at the Internet as a way to become filthy rich? He seems to despise the filthy rich? I like that he takes the bus. The world needs more guys like this!

As to the lawsuit, I think he looked beyond simple data scraping; he knew a lot of us out here say one thing, but are looking to capitalize, and live like Lord Fauntleroy in the end? One day, hoping to give that TED talk, and let's not forget the finally marrying the cool chick with all that slick loot? And getting the eventual divorce?

Craig said no to the real money! I really thought he would sell out by now, but has stayed pretty modest.

binxbolling• 11 years ago

I don't understand the question marks? I am missing something? This is a reference to something or what?

sseveran• 11 years ago

Well it was found to legally correct. Similar findings have been found in other cases involving websites that can be publicly accessed.

polemic• 11 years ago

Can someone explain why, exactly, EFF is getting a payment as part of this settlement? Was it a stipulation of the settlement made by the defendants?

dogweather3• 11 years ago

It's unclear: the article makes claims that can't be substantiated:

* The legal documents don't mention any payment (required or otherwise) to EFF.

* The EFF doesn't mention any payment (required or otherwise) from CL.

* Only 3taps' own blog mentions this, which the article quotes extensively without attribution.

zaidf• 11 years ago

It would be poetic justice if EFF dedicates this money to fighting future lawsuits from CL. I don't think we have seen the last of this.

suprgeek• 11 years ago

While there maybe subtleties in "public access by humans" over "automated scraping" - these belong in the "business dispute" side of the fence. Using the CFAA is by definition - playing hardball - it includes Criminal Penalties in some cases.

What really amuses me is that in the Tweet highlighted, Craig is indeed implying that it is his money going to the EFF - who Opposed him in the legal case that lead to the money. So he should be called out for egregious bullying - using the threat of Criminal Sanction to get his way.

If an HN-friendly business (whatever that is) pulled the same move it would also be equally worthy of opprobrium.

gavanwoolery• 11 years ago

Craigslist continues to destroy its competition by maintaining its walled garden. This wouldn't bug me as much if CL was actually serious about improving its user experience, which has more or less been the same for the past decade (just bad enough to be usable).

I don't mind it being spartan - but that aside there are usability issues. One simple example is the reason things like PadMapper and HousingMaps became popular. Another example is that their categories are often hard to filter through. Lastly, there are trust issues - something like "connect to Facebook" would really go a long way in some transactions.

If anyone ever needed proof that monopolies crush innovation, this would be a good starting point.

eli2• 11 years ago

I don't see the connection between bullying being acceptable and improving a site's UX. If it's wrong then it's wrong regardless of whether or not they steal competitor's ideas when they crush them.

JustSomeNobody4• 11 years ago

I don't have a problem with CL. It's dirt simple and it works. It reminds me of the simplicity of newspaper want ads.

3am2• 11 years ago

CL is popular because it's simple, easy, cheap. They have tons of competitors that they manage to beat, so they're doing something right. Companies that want to horn in on them should create the marketplace as well as the front end, but they would fail at it so they're just left with complaining.

tptacek11• 11 years ago

I think what you're trying to imply here is approximately as accurate as Techdirt's claim that Newmark "made the CFAA worse".

The CFAA isn't the only set of laws that has both a criminal statute and a civil cause of action. Newmark didn't --- can't, in fact --- threaten anyone criminally. Craigslist's recourse to a statute that included a criminal component added no rigidity to the ball they were playing with, whatsoever. Since they were suing to enforce their own terms of service, the CFAA was the correct statute to cite.

Other people on this thread have also suggested that recourse to the CFAA was somehow a nuclear option for Craigslist. It was not. People think this because Techdirt is misleading them, in order to whip up rageviews. You should be irritated at them for doing that (it's pretty much their whole M.O.).

mikehawkins• 11 years ago

Well put - and I had to chuckle at your use of the term 'rageviews'... I hadn't read that one before.

reagency2• 11 years ago

And it works :-( judging from the slacktivist chatter among my less intelligent (previously determined, not judging based on politics) but still technologically geeky FB friends.

briandear3• 11 years ago

Tangential to the main issue but Tech Dirt needs lessons on basic journalism. CFAA should have been defined at first reference. It's just bad writing. I had no idea what CFAA meant until I Googled it. I wish these kinds of publications would learn what a style book is.

kev009• 11 years ago

Not very familiar with him but stumbled upon this a while ago and it's some of the worst business and personal advice I've ever seen: http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-m.... I wondered if he has some screws loose after reading it.

As someone deeply interested in UNIX history, it's also revisionist and dismissive of hard fought wins by people who don't cower like he did -- real UNIX is incredibly successful to this day.. SysV (Solaris/Illumos), BSD, etc.

tdk• 11 years ago

Thanks for posting this. The TL;DR version of this article is:

I was asked for my advice, there was a clear cut right answer, that would have been good for the company and good for the future of the internet, but would have upset my bosses.
Instead, I kept my mouth shut to help my career. This makes me "grown as a person" and "politically and socially clueful".

No, it makes you a jerk.

btw, running craigslist is a "public service" and makes me a "philanthropist".

So you've given away the $400 million you made off craigslist, then? No? Then you're a delusional jerk.

jasonkester3• 11 years ago

This is really silly. Reading the article, it seems that:

1. Craigslist donated a bunch of money to somebody (which seems like a good thing)

2. Craigslist sued some company for scraping their data and using it in violation of their Terms of Service. And won a settlement. (which seems like a good thing)

So in short, good job Craigslist. Why is the author so angry?

chaostheory4• 11 years ago

Why is the author so angry?

Because you didn't really read the article (or possibly the article isn't well written but I understood it)

1. Your order of events is wrong. Craigslist sued. Won. Then used the proceeds from the lawsuit to donate. This isn't money earned normally.

2. The problem is the lawsuit itself. Craigslist is abusing a law that is meant to deal with hackers intruding on someone's private network. Visiting someone's publicly accessible website and access publicly accessible data is not intruding on someone else's network. Chances are other 3rd parties will now start to abuse this law. i.e. This somewhat reminds me of companies suing people for summarizing a news article into a blog post and linking back to the name original article. In this case, I believe the 3rd parties were creating embedded Google Maps based on the addresses found on Craigslist listing (because Craigslist pre-lawsuit refused to do so) and linking back to the original listing.

TDLR Craigslist successfully stopped a company from fair use of their public content by accusing them of hacking into their network. Craigslist then donates some of the proceeds of lawsuit's 'damages' to the EFF.

jasonkester3• 11 years ago

But wait, you haven't added any new information. You've just re-stated the information in the article.

So yes, they sued before donating. And yes, they used the proceeds. But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.

Even reading your comment (or its sibling that was posted during the same minute) gives enough information to come to that conclusion.

Craigslist said "don't scrape our data". This other company scraped their data and used it to build their business, so Craigslist sued. That's exactly the world I'd like to live in.

tptacek11• 11 years ago

This is a deeply inaccurate summary of what actually happened, but it's understandable why you'd write it, because it's the same manipulative framing Techdirt chose.

raesene5• 11 years ago

Err, you saw the bit where it's not Craigslist's money that's being donated, but the settlement that they got from 3Taps right?

And the bit where a very dubious interpretation of the CFAA which is opposed by the EFF was used as the legal basis to sue 3Taps...

Cyclone_• 11 years ago

Craigslist has always been a sleazy company and didn't get serious about the violence that resulted from the postings on their site until massive public pressure. Craig Newark seems like someone who will put profit ahead of everything.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

Quite odd that he'd donate money from a settlement to an organization that filed a brief _against him_ in the case. I wonder why he did that. Ah wait, I see, that was part of the settlement, the other businesses said they'd pay the penalty if he donated it to EFF and he agreed. Ha, that's something.

Perhaps EFF should earmark his donation in a fund specifically dedicated to legal defense against any future CFAA suits filed by Craigslist?

elchief• 11 years ago

So basically our competitors can sue us now for browsing their websites?

pla3rhat3r• 11 years ago

What a shit show. From the surface it certainly feels like this is just money moving from one entity to another with Craig sort of taking credit for donating the money. There is clearly more to this story that the journalist either isn't disclosing or didn't find in their investigation. It's not to say Craig doesn't have $1M sitting around to give, and I'm sure he'd back the EFF, but this whole thing doesn't smell right.

Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF

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