
Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF - peter123
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150701/14150431519/no-craig-newmark-did-not-donate-to-eff-he-helped-make-cfaa-worse-instead.shtml
======
suprgeek
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
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.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
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.

~~~
nitrogen
We tend not to know what we're missing until someone gets sued for trying to
give it to us.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Depending on how they're trying to give us something, they might darn well
deserve to be sued!

------
downandout
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.

~~~
belorn
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?

~~~
eli
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.

~~~
tptacek
You're the second person in this thread to suggest that the CFAA was somehow a
nuclear option.

You're saying this because Techdirt is manipulating you.

The CFAA is in fact the logical private cause of action for suits to enforce
terms of service. It is literally the section of the US code about enforcing
ToS's.

A civil suit is a civil suit. CFAA-derived civil suits are not especially more
scary than other civil suits. It's scary to be sued by Craigslist no matter
what. The CFAA has nothing to do with it.

You should be irritated at Techdirt for misinforming you solely to generate
rageviews.

------
res0nat0r
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
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.

~~~
teacup50
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.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
I wouldn't consider the result of legal settlement to be a "donation". A
donation is a voluntary transfer of money. Had craigslist received $1M from a
settlement and then voluntarily sent EFF $1M without being specified to in the
legal settlement, then that would be a donation. The correct interpretation is
that the $1M transfer is part of a legal settlement to resolve a lawsuit. I
haven't followed this lawsuit too closely, but it sounds like craigslist might
not have had a "open-and-closed" case, hence the need to offer these amenable
terms to sweeten the terms of surrender, and thus hasten the resolution.

"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, "

~~~
zck
Yes; specifically, if the proposed settlement was "3taps will give Craigslist
$1 million, which Craigslist will have no restrictions on", then 3taps might
not have agreed to it.

~~~
res0nat0r
Maybe CL initiated the requirement that the money was going to go to the EFF
after being paid to them? Seems like most of the ill-will related speculation
might be just that until there is any evidence either way...

~~~
taejo
If they wanted to donate the money to the EFF, they wouldn't have needed to
bind themselves to that in the settlement.

~~~
teacup50
I often bind myself to ethical decisions in business. Taking away the
opportunity to do the wrong thing later is a safety feature.

~~~
Dylan16807
If you want to bind yourself to a donation, fill out a check and mail it.

This is not really a donation.

------
methehack
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.

~~~
teacup50
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.

~~~
methehack
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.

~~~
hartator
Have you had ever used Craiglist? Everything you say is alreaady built-in.

~~~
methehack
Ok it looks like after suing that poor dude, they added a map to the apartment
listings finally. I stand corrected on that one. It was missing forever.

I still don't see anywhere to search across regions. If you've ever tried to
find a hard to find car you'd understand what I mean there. I'd like to search
in, say, all of California. Can't do it.

My point is that there's a lot that could be done that will not be done
because they won't let people scrape even if they link back. So, for example,
say I wanted to add a state-wide search. Even if all my search results pointed
back to CL, CL would cease and desist me. This goes for other enhanced
functionality as well. This is all legal, but see it for what it is: an
aggressive use of their position to retain their position, which includes
squelching any and all uses of their data. It's an anit-competitive move that
let's them maintain what, in my opinion, is a very poor quality product for
all the traffic and data they get.

~~~
makomk
At least in the UK version, they do have some kind of cross-region search now
in the sidebar. (Which is pretty much essential here, because their region
boundaries don't make much sense and people don't always agree on what region
they're in.)

~~~
albedoa
That's great, and if it's essential for the UK, imagine how needed it must be
in the US.

The UK has 243,610 square kilometers. California alone has 423,970.

------
rurounijones
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.

~~~
justonepost
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.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
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/](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.

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

You know most people make compensation part of their decision on who to work
for / who to hire? You can get money out of any kind of hiring..

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I don't regard that as corruption.

What I do regard as corruption, is when a recruiter convinces a manager that
they can find qualified staff, then expect thirty grand in commissions by
placing someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started,

~~~
simoncion
> ...someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started

I'll bite. What the heck does this mean?

~~~
MichaelCrawford
They are deceased, but not yet cold.

I am good at my work, I take pride in it but recruiters commonly solicit me
for perm or contract work for which I am completely unqualified. For example I
do osx device drivers and windows gui so on a damn near daily basis I am
approached by recruiters who want to submit me for windows device driver work,
even at microsoft.

Their applicant tracking systems other do not support exact phrase matching or
the recruiters dont know what it is. Neither do they ever attempt to read my
resume, not even when they do submit me.

Many of my "colleagues" were obvious imposters who found work through
recruiters. The recruiters dont care, they get paid, see.

~~~
simoncion
_sigh_ This isn't a problem with recruiters [0]. This is a hiring problem.
Hiring isn't very easy, and it seems that a huge number of companies don't
know how to hire.

You have opinions and your HN profile indicates that you've been programming
for a long time, but that doesn't appear to have any relevance to your
opinions on hiring.

Oh, BTW, you have some mojibake in the Education section of your online
resume.

[0] Numerically, most recruiters suck. This has nothing to do with hiring. :)

~~~
MichaelCrawford
LOLCats.

Oddly that page has utf-8 encoding. The mojibake were em-dashes in the
original OO document, I don't clearly recall but likely copied it to the
clipboard, then to textwrangler for OS X than marked up the HTML.

textwrangler can do every text encoding but it is fiddly to actually get it
right.

Get A Load of:

[http://www.warplife.com/mdc/ya-kazakh/](http://www.warplife.com/mdc/ya-
kazakh/)

Russian for "I Am A Cossack!", more or less I have a bad attitude and fear no
one.

The mojibake would be trivial to fix but my position is that I should not have
to, I leave it there in hopes someone at Apache or Mozilla will clue into it.

~~~
simoncion
I've seen that very same character sequence whenever a Slashcode site is asked
to handle Unicode out of the ASCII range. If I had to bet, I'd say that
textwrangler fucked up your document somehow, whether through poor design or
improper operation. It's strange that you'd think that someone from Apache or
Mozilla would:

a) Be randomly reading your online resume.

b) Think that the mojibake contained within was the fault of some software
that _they_ maintained.

Additionally, I've had occasion to work with many, many people. I've found
that -regardless of brilliance and competency- folks with bad attitudes almost
always make bad coworkers. :)

Anyway. I hope you come to understand why your declarations about your side
projects tend to mystify people, and why your strongly held stances tend to
not gain traction with others. All the best, man.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Sorry I should have been more clear, I regard the mojibake in Ya Kazakh as a
bug either in Apache or the web browsers.

~~~
simoncion
People believe all sorts of things that are incorrect.

Carefully inspect -in a good text editor- the files that you have asked your
web server to serve. I suspect that you will discover that what is being
delivered to the browser is exactly what is in the files on disk. :)

Or, view source on your personal page. (Notice that the page is served up as
UTF-8, so that what is served up will be what was on disk.) Here is a snippet
of what's served up, verbatim:

    
    
      <p>EspaÃ±ol Mexicano, EspaÃ±ol Castellano: "MEE-gÉ™-LEET-oh".</p>
    
      <p>Por Favor?  EspaÃ±ol Americano Centrale?  EspaÃ±ol Americano del Sur? "mÉ™-LEET-oh".
      "G" Silencio!</p>
    
      <p>Ð¯ name is ÐœÑ–ÑˆÐ°.  Ð¯ ÐºÐ°Ð·Ð°Ñ…!</p>

------
lotharbot
Previous discussion of CL's suit against 3taps:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034)

The court ruling is at [http://www.volokh.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi...](http://www.volokh.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denying-Renewed-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf) and is
surprisingly readable.

------
kev009
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...](http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-mouth-
shut.html). 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
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.

------
briandear
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.

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

~~~
MichaelGG
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.

~~~
sangnoir
> 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.

~~~
Dylan16807
A rule against hammering a server is not at all the same as a rule against
accessing the server at all.

~~~
sangnoir
We likely are in agreement - isn't a rule against hammering a server 'a legal
limit on the kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system'? I was
disagreeing with parent who said:

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

~~~
Dylan16807
The difference between "limit on _that_ kind of behavior" and "limit on _the_
kind of behavior" is critical.

A limit on red cars is a limit on "the color" of cars, but it's not a limit on
"that color" when someone is pointing at a blue car.

So when "that kind" refers to sanely-implemented scraping, then there should
not be a limit. There is a limit on "the kind", to restrict it to activities
like scraping that aren't inherently harmful.

~~~
sangnoir
Unfortunately english isn't very precise: it's difficult to parse what
MichaelGG was referring to by 'that'. I assumed he was referring to scraping
(his previous sentence), but it's also possible he was referring to the CL
case.

For the record, I maintain my belief that there should be a law that applies
to scraping of publicly available sites.

> 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

------
polemic
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?

~~~
dogweather
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.

------
pla3rhat3r
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.

------
jrochkind1
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?

------
zaidf
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.

------
jasonkester
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?

~~~
chaostheory
> 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.

~~~
jasonkester
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.

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

Yes because from the little that you wrote, it didn't sound like you
understood any of it. Maybe you should elaborate more from the start?

> But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things.

You're wrong.

1\. Craigslist killed two companies in the process. The worse part is that if
Craigslist only listened to its users and improved their website, none of this
would have even happened.

2\. Now any company can stop anyone from fair use of their content. All they
have to do is accuse them of Craigslists' definition of hacking under the
CFAA. e.g. news sites can now potentially threaten companies like Google with
the CFAA for listing their articles on Google News

3\. Maybe if the scraping led to an outright copy of Craigslist's listing
content I can understand. However, they were transforming that content into
something more (something that Craigslist refused to do on their own site for
years), kind of what Google does with search results. Moreover they were
linking back to the original post (attribution).

4\. Just because there's a term or clause in a TOS, it doesn't mean that it's
legal.

5\. The main result from this is to help maintain the entrenchment of the
status quo which hurts overall innovation.

Really we should start here: are you familiar with Fair Use?

~~~
jasonkester
> Craigslist killed two companies

... but they didn't. Those two companies killed themselves by building their
entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to use.

And it's not like they were led to believe that the data was usable. It was
clearly marked as not usable, for the exact purpose they used it for.

It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the
internet, it's fair game to use. But it's not. Thankfully.

Chances are we're both wrong (you legally and me libertarianally). But the
only thing we've established here is that we disagree.

~~~
chaostheory
> Those two companies killed themselves

I disagree. You're implying that Craigslist was passive, and they were just
watching from the sidelines. They weren't. They sued.

> building their entire business off of data that the didn't have the right to
> use.

This is our main point of contention, and we'll probably just agree to
disagree.

> It may be that your personal opinion is that once a piece of text is on the
> internet, it's fair game to use.

imo it depends on how you use it. Unless I misunderstood something, if we had
it your way we wouldn't even be able to write wikipedia articles based on data
gleaned from online content even with attribution unless the owner gives
permission

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

------
Cyclone_
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.

------
justonepost
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.

~~~
geofft
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.

~~~
whyenot
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.

~~~
MichaelGG
Why is it _morally_ wrong? It may be a risky technical decision, but how can
it be morally wrong? Would it have been better if the data was processed via a
client-side browser plugin?

And Uber's "fuck the rules" are on a totally different level than sending HTTP
requests to a server to aggregate publicly accessible information.

~~~
sangnoir
1\. The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used

2\. Provider of a service can set out terms of service

3\. When using someone else resource, it is _polite_ to do as asked ("Please
don't finish all the staples" or "Please don't use my stapler John. Jane can
still use it")

Increasing CLs server load & increasing their bandwidth costs was morally
questionable, it became clearly immoral once they knew CL didn't like what
they were doing.

~~~
geofft
> 1\. The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used

Padmapper mined data (apartment locations, prices, number of bedrooms, URL to
Craigslist post), not creative presentation. Even if we believe that it's
somehow morally reasonable for Craigslist to have copyright over the text of
user postings, the data Padmapper required was clearly not copyrightable. This
was a CFAA case, not a copyright case.

(Yes, in practice Padmapper also displayed descriptions and photos, but they
could have avoided doing so, and the service would still have been useful.)

~~~
ericd
Thanks for clearing that up. We actually didn't include descriptions, though,
just the title as part of the link back to the original.

