
3taps vs. Craigslist -- Who owns public data? - linuxlewis
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/craigslist-3taps-the-court-battle-for-the-soul-of-public-data.php
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tptacek
It's not "public data". Illustrating example: people can and do make different
offers on Craigslist than they do in other channels.

~~~
pjlegato
Thing is, factual data itself, such as "Someone is offering to the public to
sell X for $Y," is not subject to copyright. Copyright-eligible works must
include some element of creativity, however small.
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural>)

So the text of a classified ad itself is indeed copyrightable, but the mere
fact that a house at 123 Some Avenue is for rent for $1,000 per month is not.
Having learned of that fact from a copyrighted work, and in the absence of an
NDA or something similar, you are free to disseminate that fact as you like.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

~~~
tptacek
That might be true, but it doesn't follow that you can lawfully scrape facts
out of copyrighted content on someone else's website.

~~~
benmccann
How is this different than Feist v. Rural in your mind? A fact is not
copyrightable and is scrapable according to that case. I don't see how having
copyrighted content next to non-copyrighted content affords any protection to
the non-copyrighted content.

~~~
tptacek
First, Feist says nothing about content being "scrapable". It's a 1991 case.
To pull content off Craigslist against their will, you have to cross the CFAA.

Second, phone numbers are raw facts, but advertisements are not; every
advertisement ever has been copyrighted, and a whole 11-figure industry
depends on that.

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willrobinson
The more Sherman Act claims that are brought against web incumbents, the
sooner one is going to stick.

The CL blog stinks of entitlement.

Craigslist "stole" the classifieds business from local newspapers. Now they
are accusing others of trying to "steal" the "CL idea" from them.

I am one of (probably) the few who actually prefer a CL type interface. But
the way CL is behaving in the face of competition is just embarassing. If
someone wants to reshape the data, then you have to let them. The data is not
the property of CL. If users do not want their data on some other site, then
that's their issue to raise, not CL's.

~~~
anigbrowl
You'd need to show that CL copied ads from newspapers in order to attract
traffic, and I don't believe that's the case. taking away market share and
scraping someone's website for content are vastly different things.

~~~
einhverfr
But when giving away an exclusive license, as CL requires, you aren't allowed
to run the same content in both the newspaper and CL, right?

I have always wondered about running a similar listing somewhere else first,
then running something lightly edited on Craigslist, sending their registered
agent, by registered mail, a note that the exclusive license applies only to
the relatively minor editorial changes applied.... I wonder how fast such
would get delisted....

~~~
willrobinson
Do you think most people listing ads on CL read the terms and understand them
as you did? (Or were the terms confusing?) Are CL's terms different from what
one would normally expect from a newspaper? That is, would you expect that the
newspaper would require an exclusive license and prohibit you from running
your ad anywhere else?

~~~
einhverfr
Yes, they are. Normally if someone wants an exclusive right to content they
pay the producer for them. Virtually everyone else asks for a non-exclusive
license. This is _very different_ and has been discussed here on HN before.

~~~
willrobinson
And didn't CL change their terms (excl-->nonexcl) after some blogger posted
about them? And didn't they make some changes to their site (collaborate with
a maps provider so users can now get geo mappings) after filing this lawsuit?
I've already forgotten now. This case just seems laughable to me. But what do
I know.

------
001sky
_3taps will file an antitrust countersuit, alleging that Craigslist maintains
a [monopolistic control] over numerous markets related to online classified
advertising. If successful, 3taps could open up the market to numerous
innovations atop Craigslist data and bring about the user interface and search
features, whose lacking seem to be exemplified by the popularity of sites such
as PadMapper_

\-- Anti trust is an interesting angle.

The Irony is that newspapers (the competition) were all reliant on classified
ads, which have been decimated by craigslist. As it is, Craigslist is just a
good competitor with a more efficient system and better pricing. There are
other choices, just at different pricepoints. Its not clear this is a winning
formula.

It will be interesting to see if there are other angles of attack -- such as
fair use -- which would also allow re-purposing of data posted to quasi-public
internet places, that hold non-exclusive rights on said information.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sigh, antitrust is a dead end. It _might_ have been possible to argue prior
restraint if Craigslist had stuck with their silly 'we own this' clause but
they didn't.

My guess is that any judge would say "Can anyone else make a classifieds
site?" and "Does Craigslist interfere with anyone on their site using a
different site?". Since the answer will be 'No' and 'No' thus they don't have
a monopoly.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That seems overly simplistic. Anybody could have used a different browser/OS
(there were several available in the 90s), yet MS was still found to be
violating antitrust laws.

The real question is whether Craigslist is using its market dominance in a way
that hurts consumers. It's a far more nuanced question and one that will be
fascinating to watch get answered. Craigslist _did_ some awesome things for
consumers once upon a time. Now? I'm not so sure it's all positive.

~~~
001sky
Your counter-example (ms windows+expolorer) is not-quite on point, though.
Consider: windows _had_ a legitimate monopoly, and then they "abused" it. But,
because you are presuming the existence of a monopoly for CL this does not
work. CL is an online classified ads business. The barriers to entry are de-
minimus (unlike, OS software + hw compatibility, ect). So the _premise_ of
monopoly can be attacked fairly and directly.

CL arguably is not abusing a monoploy because they don't even have one. They
just have a cheap service, and nobody wants to pay to do it different. The
consideration you raise -- are they anti consumer -- is an interesting one to
think through. It does seem they over-reached (re: the exclusivity of data).
But without any _contractual_ exclusivity or _confidentiality_ its not clear
that CL can "monopolize" publicly _published_ data, given that the most
valuable bits are (at least for rentals) nothing but street adresses,
apartment #s, and possibly Telco #s. These data are not legal-sense
"intellectual property" under most concepts (patent, copyright, or trade
secret).

It would be an interesting argument to see the threshold case: when/where do 3
facts become a creative work? Its not a trivial argument, though, because at
some stage N words becomes a lyric a poem or an idea. You cant copyright a
word, though. Its highly unlikely you can copyright an adress. They might try
to argue its like a "recipe" or some such (list of common ingredients?). Who
knows. But somewhere in there, I'm guessing we'll find out.

------
willrobinson
If data is deliberately made available to the public, then it's public data.
Even if's made available for free, that won't stop some on the web from trying
to repackage it and derive commercial benefit from it. We've seen this many
times. These folks have been very lucky that the validity of their assumptions
has not been thoroughly tested in court. Somehow they become convinced they
own the data. In reality they are merely the distributor.

Even if CL wins, e.g., they are granted an injunction to stop another site
from scraping, scrapers can just get the same data from search engine caches.
It's hard to argue trespass to chattels when the alleged trespasser never
touches your servers. Moreover, search engines are themselves scrapers so
clearly scraping is not per se a damaging activity in CL's view, only when it
suits CL to view it that way. Arguing that robots.txt is a "license" is a
stretch. It's designed to be read by a machine not a human.

And what if CL loses? What are the stakes then? Well, I'll let you answer that
one. What exactly does 3taps have to lose?

CL claims they own the copyrights to facts and descriptions uploaded by CL
users. Are users aware of this? Is it reasonable?

3taps' Answer should be a fun read.

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buro9
Does the USA not have a database right?

<http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/copyright/Page92.html>

Effectively acknowledging that the contents of a database may have varying
copyright (owner, public works, facts, etc), but that the database itself is
given protection implicitly if the database is "original and the result of
substantial investment".

This is why you find fake data in Google Maps, the Rare Record Price Guide
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0953260194> and so on. Because they
are representations of databases and all the companies behind them have to do
to have the protection is to prove that other representations of the data have
been sourced from their database, which they do by pointing at the secret fake
data that is part of the database.

Does that not exist? It offers protection to any entity that has compiled an
original source of data at their expense.

~~~
einhverfr
The US does not recognize copyrights over databases. The issue though is that
depending on the ads in question there may be creative elements.

For example, suppose I place an ad to rent my house out and include just info.
Not likely protected but if I do it in iambic pentameter, probably is
protected.

What this wouldn't prevent is someone scraping CL for facts (appartments for
rent, x bed, y bath, z sq ft), extracting those facts, and arranging them in
another order. That doesn't strike me as protectable in the US, even if it
involves scraping directly from CL.

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einhverfr
I think we should create an app called clscraper which does as follows:

Given a set of resources, crawls across the site, extracting specific
information from listings (price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms,
square ft etc, contact info). Puts them in a very simple database. This should
be 100% trouble-free copyright-wise at least in the US. The larger issue
becomes what happens under other laws. However building a generic tool to
extract (non-copyright-worthy!) facts from ads should by itself be more or
less trouble-free.

Make this generic enough to work on most ad sites out there. Push the boundary
back.

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Diamons
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but this is how I see this whole ordeal.

Craigslist, a website that built up its user base and functionality by itself
(lots of persistent hard work over the years) has listings.

3TAPS believes this information is public and should be freely accessible by
anyone.

How does that make any sense at all? If I work for years to build a website, I
will use and lease MY damn data however I please. A 3rd party has no right to
claim that the website I have created that people use is "public property". I
built the house. Now you're going to tell me it's a shelter?

------
einhverfr
Those who doubted that an exclusive license was truly exclusive should take
note.

Craigslist here is arguing that they own essentially full copyright on all
listings. This means if you advertise on Craigslist and you submit the same
listing somewhere else you are guilty of breach of contract, and the other
party may be guilty of copyright violation. How long before users start
getting sued by one party to such litigation?

This is big trouble. We need to highlight that you give away all rights to all
issue listings including the same material elsewhere.

