My logical brain says that suing Padmapper is perfectly reasonable. My emotional brain is crying at the idea of using raw Craigslist ads to find an apartment the next time I move to a new city.
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.
Yeah, I'm in a similar position. Every time I have to use Craigslist I come much closer to hating the team behind it. I mean, I know it's probably not rational, but I think they are being shitty people for locking up so much useful data behind a site that is designed to be miserable to use. It's pretty evil when you get down to it. It's obvious they don't care about users.
That's ridiculous. Craigslist lets you refine your search down to the neighborhood. It's not that hard to use. People find apartments on there all the time.
Depends on which Craigslist you use -- the neighborhood listings aren't particularly granular, and neighborhoods themselves aren't fixed, so one person's Glen Park (for instance) could be another's Outer Mission. Using a map is an uncontestedly superior interface for organizing geographic data. People find apartments on Craiglist despite the interface.
This is not to address the issue of ownership of listing data, or the case law, which latter isn't settled anyway.
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.