I think this is the same issue as Padmapper, just on a much smaller scale. Don't write code that will re-display/re-post content of a Craigslist post on your 3rd party website.
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.
>Don't write code that will re-display/re-post content of a Craigslist post on your 3rd party website.
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.
> 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.
-> "Krrb does not have the right to scrape data from
Craigslist, on your say-so."
Wrong logic here my friend, it is the user to scrape and repost. Krrb just help user to make the process easier by making the tool
The question is whose data is it? Padmapper just scraped whole site for apartment listings. This is an action by the user to take their post, which they wrote, and redisplay it somewhere else.
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.
I don't think this is what's happening here - for either Krrb or Padmapper.
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!
Does it matter that they are using Craigslist infrastructure to automate the process? Consuming bandwidth that Craigslist pays for and taking advantage of the hosting Craigslist is offering their paying customers? Sure, facts are not copyrightable, but if you took a stack of phonebooks from a recycling bin and starting selling them as your own, I think the company that printed the phones books might have an issue with that.
As I understand it, Krrb is not using Craigslist infrastructure - it is simply taking the post already in the user's browser because they navigated there in the process of entering the post, and copying the text out for reuse.
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.
The post I was replying to was grouping krrb and padmapper. I don't know much about krrb or what it does. Seems like a glorified copy past so I'm not sure how that exactly translates to a business worth putting this much effort into defending. Maybe I'm missing something.
But padmapper is clearly leveraging Craiglist's infrastructure for padmapper’s own benefit. I find that difficult to defend.
Plus there needs to be a certain level of creative expression for copyright to apply, so even the sentence, "I have a room in a 2-bedroom apartment for rent in Williamsburg, going for $1500," would almost certainly not be copyrightable. (That said, some of the posts on craigslist are certainly creative, so copying the full contents of everything would likely violate copyrights, but as you say, that's not what Padmapper is doing. (Not to mention the copyrights on the individual posts belong to the users, not to craigslist, in any case.))
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.