Why on earth would another newspaper print an ad or a classified that they're not being paid for?
Also, do you have any examples of this hypothetical happening and newspaper A not having a problem with it? Outside of tabloid culture, ye olde newspapers had much more in the way of principles, and using another's content without permission was reprehensible.
> Why on earth would another newspaper print an ad or a classified that they're not being paid for?
It's kind of funny, isn't it? On the one hand we have the newspapers, who are being slowly killed off by the internet, and on the other hand we have internet startups like Padmapper who are doing things that are absolutely and plainly stupid when you imagine them being done by newspapers rather than web startups.
Here we have one company that allows free classified ads for almost everything, everywhere (Craigslist) on the one hand, and another company that scrapes free classified ads for rental housing and accepts no payment from anyone (Padmapper). Very strange.
FWIW, to me, Padmapper drives traffic to Craigslist rather than competing with it. Whether that traffic is valuable to Craigslist or not I can't say.
Actually, this is really interesting. If a free newspaper did start repulishing ads and the primary paper cut them off, the ad posters would be up in arms because their audience is now reduced.
Its a loose loose scenario, much better to allow the reproductuon for everyone.
What if newspaper B held positions the advertiser didn't want to be identified with? Or had readers the advertiser didn't want to do business with? Or presented their ads in a way that they didn't want? I don't think you can assume the advertiser cares only about the widest audience.
Don't forget that screen-scraping doesn't work in print journalism - transferring the ads is labour-intensive.
But even if the labour was free and paper B was willing to print ads/classifieds for no money, it's still a drain on paper A's resources - running a classifieds department required staff taking calls for placed ads, plus editorial work and similar. If paper B takes those ads and sells them at a lower price, then paper A will lose out on revenue for value created by their staff.
Nobody is expecting craigslist to push data to 3rd parties. They expose programmatic ways to access listings, and PadMapper used them.