

Ask HN:  Pure client-side PadMapper would be legal and easy, yeah? - eevilspock

PadMapper's new workaround based on 3Taps is being hotly debated today:  http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/07/09/bringing-craigslist-back/.  3Taps claims that Craigslist listings are in the public domain.  Whether or not you agree, PadMapper is in essence escaping Craigslist's lawyers simply by hiding behind 3Taps. But let me get to my questions.<p>PadMapper is really just an alternative view of Craigslist data. I don't see any functionality that couldn't be implemented purely on the client side, using for example Javascript executed as an extension or a bookmarklet. This client-side code would execute Craigslist searches, scrape the results, and render in the form that PadMapper does today.  While the TOS can disallow other businesses from such scraping and re-publication, I can't see how Craigslist has any legal standing to disallow users from doing that for themselves (in which case it's personal use, not re-publication), whether they do so manually by jotting down listings on a notepad or automatically by running a script on their computer.<p>Can anyone give solid arguments against what I am suggesting?
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gregkidd
for background (reposted from Quora)

Greg Kidd, 3taps.com Founder, Craiggers.com back... Edit Bio 6 votes by Trevor
Bezdek, Eugene Otto, Pat Roberts, (more) With regards to any 3rd party use of
exchange postings in the public domain, be they from Craigslist or any other
source that is posting goods and services on the public internet:

1) the fact of an item for sale and the description of that item is not an
issue of copyright. The long history of legal theory on this subject is best
expounded in the Supreme Court case Feist vs. Rural Telephone. Furthermore,
price discovery and transparency of supply and demand require open and equal
access to facts in the public domain regarding goods and services for sale. A
price quote for a stock or bond or piece of fruit does not "belong" to the
originating exchange on which the item is initially offered. The price and
identifying information, if put forth in an exchange with public access, is a
public good rather than a private entitlement. I, the potential buyer, am free
to record that price and those details for comparison or sharing or any other
use I so choose to make of with those facts.

2) the facts associated with Craigslist data can be found all over the
internet and do not have to be gleaned (scraped) from Craigslist itself.
Craigslist is not operating a members only walled garden and has already
availed itself to search engines which make their data (along with all other
discoverable facts on the internet) available in public domain space. It might
be harder to find the data indirectly than directly (as Craigslist doesn’t
have an API of its own), but that doesn’t mean that the data isn’t already out
there and available to anyone who is willing to put the work in to find and
organize those (or any other) postings about goods and services for sale to
the general public.

Treat point #1 as an understanding of “what the data is.” Treat point #2 as an
understanding of “where the data comes from.” No Terms of Use can trump
existing copyright law or first amendment free speech protections. Its true
that we live in America where entities write all sorts of predatory contracts
with outlandish claims of liquidated damages. But if the claims are, in fact,
based on a bogus pretense, then eventually the fallacy will be challenged and
over turned. And while a Terms of Use could set conditions for accessing
particular private servers by CL, if PadMapper is using alternative public
domain sources, what possible access issue could there be?

Being a bully usually works -- until it doesn't.

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chimi
A negligible population would use such a tool, not only because hardly anyone
in the "real world" uses bookmarklets -- and then what about NOSCRIPT?, but
the time it would take to scrape, process, geolocate, and present the
apartment listing would dissuade the most diehard fans -- all that assuming of
course you could get around the cross-domain JavaScript issues lurking around
every corner.

It's just not a viable solution.

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fredglick
Try <http://rentscoper.com> instead. With heat maps that tell you if you are
paying too much and Yelp ratings, it makes more sense.

~~~
modarts
That's actually a pretty terrible website on a few counts. A lot of tiles I
tried didn't show the heatmap at all.

------
eevilspock
Eric DeMenthon, the man behind Padmapper, freely admits that "it still seems
somewhat dickish to go against [Craiglist's] wishes." But he then proceeds to
rationalize doing it anyway, using a "the good of the many outweighs the good
of the few" argument:

 _"But then I did some back of the envelope estimates of how much of people’s
time and effort it would waste if I didn’t, and it became clear how much less
nice it is to waste the time of millions of apartment hunters out of
stubbornness or some clearly inaccurate assumption about the will of the
community."_

If Eric is honestly doing this for the good of the community rather than for
his own aggrandizement, and if I am right about the ethics and legality of a
pure client-side solution, there is no excuse not to do it.

~~~
ericd
I'm pretty confused by your argument. How is making a bookmarklet better
morally or legally than just using an API, or less self-aggrandizing?
Bookmarklets are disallowed by the TOU as well. Is it because I'd just be
making hammers instead of making and using the hammers myself?

And yeah, I have a bit of a communistic bent, so needs of the many outweigh
the needs of the few arguments sway my decisions pretty heavily.

~~~
J3L2404
Isn't PadLister a direct competitor? CL is right to tell you piss off. No one
is falling for this "man of the people" crap, it just makes you look dumb.
Sorry to be harsh but you seem to be deceiving yourself, why not start a
legitimate business?

~~~
ericd
PL was more of an insurance policy to collect feeds and other listings
directly (it helps people post them back to CL). I'd be happy to take PL down
if those were the terms for CL's complicity in keeping the CL search results.

~~~
J3L2404
>insurance policy...CL's complicity

What are you talking about? I can't parse this gibberish. I know you feel CL
has no rights to their own site, but what the hell are they complicit in? The
further you go down this road the more time you waste.

~~~
ericd
Have I done something to offend you? I'm just saying that I made that in the
hopes that if I ever had to take CL search results off, PadMapper wouldn't be
mostly useless. If CL wanted me to take PL down as a condition of them being
OK with my site searching theirs, I would make that trade happily. I'm
explaining that my goal isn't to replace them/threaten them/etc.

