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.
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?
To me, I think the difference is that the guy posting goatse links is causing actual harm, while the guy scraping the website may have basically no impact. Only cases where there are actually meaningful damages should end up in court.
The company scraping Craigslist is not having "no impact". Craigslist didn't sue out of pique. They sued because their site was being forked, and they are not an open source project.
It seems reasonable to disagree about whether companies should have the right to prevent forks based on their public data sets ("can you fork the phone book?"). It does not seem reasonable to suggest that Craigslist sued simply in order to be tyrannical.
The phone book is an excellent example, because rather famously[1] at one point a powerful company tried to use IP laws to prevent someone from forking the actual phone book... and the US Supreme Court ruled that it WAS permitted. That precedent does not apply to this case which is based on different laws preventing access to the data not preventing contacting it.
> They sued because their site was being forked, and they are not an open source project.
Or, for that matter, because somebody was using up their bandwidth, which is a finite resource, for something other than the intended purpose of the site.
I'm talking specifically about the act of scraping, not about what is done with the data afterwards. The post I was responding to referred to a general scenario, rather than this specific lawsuit.
To focus on the act of scraping itself, consider a case where they download the data and study it privately. That should not go to court, even if they broke the ToS, unless there are measurable damages.
And because of the nature of 1030g, it couldn't go to court without measurable damages, because CFAA civil claims can only pursue economic damages. So, in a real sense, the implication of using the CFAA in this case is the opposite of what Techdirt manipulatively implies that it is. CFAA limited the scope of this case and reduced the stakes.
edited: this said "for 3taps" before, but I'm not sure that's accurate.
It's fair to point out they also sued after they issued a warning shot, in the form of a C & D.
I like your analogy of the site being forked. I don't believe for a 2nd that the companies scraping the CL data and putting a pretty UX on it were doing it out of any sense of altruism.
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.
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.
CFAA is necessary so people can defend their property from invaders.
You'd file criminal charges against someone who breaks into your home every night to hurl racial slurs at you and keeps picking your lock no matter how many times you change the locks; why wouldn't you file criminal charges against someone who comes on to your channel/forum/etc. every day to harass your users and uses a number of proxies to change their IP no matter how many times you IP-ban them?
Imagine if someone had sued Google for basically doing the same thing back in 1998. Would it exist today? Would we have this great quality search engine that has made our lives so much easier?
Google in fact does honor requests not to scrape websites, and honors them at Internet scale. Padmapper could, meanwhile, reasonably be defined by their unwillingness to stop scraping a single site whose lawyers made it clear they did not want to be scraped. So I'm not sure your comparison is valid.
Maybe we'd still be using something opt-in like Yahoo Directory, and maybe the web would be better for it. Yahoo directory was slower but in many ways higher-quality; it would've kept the web more decentralized (e.g. Wikipedia would not be the top result for half of queries). Of course there would have been short-term costs to that route.
"decentralized" doesn't magically mean better! I personally believe wikipedia is one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. It's been an enormous group effort.
I have a copy in my phone, unbelievable amounts of knowledge in my pocket, several libraries full. Would it somehow be better if information were harder to find?
I think downranking Wikipedia would make some information easier to find. Often a subject-matter-specific site has a better page than Wikipedia on a given topic - but Wikipedia has more google-juice, so people are directed there instead.
There is certainly value in presenting everything via a consistent interface, as Wikipedia does. But there's also value is subject-specific interfaces. And I find Wikipedia's notability criteria very problematic; Wikipedia can't be treated as a sole source of truth when it simply refuses to include any information about certain subjects. (E.g. I wanted to know about a band I'd seen once, so I looked them up on Wikipedia only to find no page; I wondered if I'd spelled them wrong or some such. Then I looked them up on TV Tropes and found a useful page about them.)
Since everyone here liked the Padmapper UI over Craigslist they were OK with what they were doing, but if this was happening to an HN friendly business the story would be entirely different and there would a massive outcry. The hypocrisy is at least to me highly entertaining.
Very! Google provides a way for you to opt out. This is not the case of "Oh, I went to their website and they sued us out of existence." This is more of a case of they were asked to not do something and they said fuck you I'll do it anyway. I don't like CFAA but I'd say these 3tap people failed at being nice to others.
Yes, I remember those discussions here in HN. The simple fact was they had built and entire product around someone else's data. They maintained an "f-you" attitude even after the cease and desists. Those companies got hammered because of their arrogance. They could have built a CL-killer but instead they built a CL-piggybacker but did so in a way that violated CL's terms of use.
People on HN often complain about YC backed startups if they do morally questionable stuff (see for example any thread about that installer bundling startup whose name I can't recall right now). The HN community isn't as bad as you make it seem.
Dont forget the hubub over YC investing in that adware bundler company (InstallMonetizer), couldnt stop hearing about that for weeks[0].
I certainly think there is a trend towards being positive towards YC properties on HN (surprise!) but if they do something bad they will be excoriated just like the rest.
Yes. And there are tons of other startups and probably also YC companies involved in heavy scraping, aggregating and selling that information to other folks.
So sue on that basis, not on accessing the website.
I think most of us are not so unhappy about the suing, although we may disagree with it. We're very unhappy about using CFAA, which passes the line into criminal penalties. So we're talking about initiating a process against someone who scraped your site that could land them in jail.
You, too, are repeating the false trope that the CFAA is an egregious overreaction by Craigslist. Not only is it not that (it is literally the federal private cause of action specifically intended for enforcing terms of service), but it's more limited than other civil causes of action: plaintiffs can sue only for certain types of damages.
It's also preposterous to suggest that Craigslist somehow "passed the line into criminal penalties". Just because a section of the law also has criminal offenses specified does not make all invocations of that law criminal. Private parties can't criminally prosecute people. There was, obviously, no risk of criminal charges in this case.
Techdirt is, as usually, being manipulative in how they frame this story. The are the Internet's foremost amplifier of online law misinformation.
He's not "creepy". That word has just become too cute? Its been so overused by gossipy people? I not implying you're gossipy--I'm just tired of overused words that come into fashion: "Really?", "Dude","tool", "noob", "tldr", "Hipster", and every expression that turns into a cliché?
I've never met the man, but he seems to respect money? He doesn't look at the Internet as a way to become filthy rich?
He seems to despise the filthy rich? I like that he takes the bus. The world needs more guys like this!
As to the lawsuit, I think he looked beyond simple data scraping; he knew a lot of us out here say one thing, but are looking to capitalize, and live like Lord Fauntleroy in the end? One day, hoping to give that TED talk, and let's not forget the finally marrying the cool chick with all that slick loot? And getting the eventual divorce?
Craig said no to the real money! I really thought he would sell out by now, but has stayed pretty modest.
