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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The owner of copyright determines how the product is to be used
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this part. If I say, "John's website is at this address," John doesn't get to say "HEY! I get to decide who links to me," because copyright isn't for facts, it's for content. That's why I disagree so vehemently with the PadMapper decision: All they were saying was "There's a CL post for this address." That's not content, and it's certainly not enough content to replace the functionality CL sued over.
> 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.)
If we're talking about morals, then the fact that CL only got copyright via a click wrap assignment, and that most postings aren't copyrightable because there's no creativity, and that the actual creators (posters) benefited from this access, I don't think things held up.
I'd also be surprised to find a real increase in load, if the scraping service served end users. Otherwise those users would be requesting directly to CL. And, if the 3rd party service worked by riding on the back of users (say, via a browser add-on), would that suddenly change things?
Communist as in it's all mine? It seems like the means of production here is the data they 'publish' and they've been very clear who the owners of that are -- craigslist and no one else.
Their aggressively litigious nature makes it difficult for others to compete and provide better services. It's difficult to penetrate the network effect juggernaut if you can't scrape their existing ads.
For a while they even changed their terms of service to give themselves an exclusive license to anything you posted on the site in order to help them sue websites that let you search it without their permission - so in theory they could've sued their own users for posting the same ads on Craigslist and elsewhere. That's fucking insane.
"Aggressively litigious nature"? Really? Because this is the first lawsuit I'm aware of involving CL, and they were clearly in the right here. So ... what's your beef?
I don't know the specific facts of this case, but the communistic element has been at the center of some similar cases. Anyone is/was allowed to use Craigslist data to make apps as long as they aren't doing it for profit. And every year people agree to these terms, but later get their access yanked when they decide to start running display ads or whatever.
"All you posts are belong to CRAIGSLIST" is not very communistic. Craigslist is just a private business using government IP law to prevent potential competitors from eating their significant market share.
> "If someone can do better than free, go right ahead."
It's hard to compete with an entity that uses the coercive power of the state to squash you.
Just tried out nextdoor.com. It tried to load 6 different tracking and marketing scripts that my browser addons blocked. Craigslist has 0. I will not be using nextdoor.
It's nothing compared to what Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Uber and literally every other website you visit or email you open does.
Craigslist may not track your actions, but it doesn't ever update it's UI/UX or add features so there's no reason for Craigslist to collect user behavior data.
Now I completely respect your personal choice, but for others who are more willing to try out something that can provide them real value, I think Nextdoor will win over Craigslist every time.
