Craigslist also sent similar cease-and-desist letters to Carsabi (which Ars profiled in April 2012) andMapskrieg, which use the site’s data to show used car listings and apartment listings, respectively. The three sites recei ved similar letters from Craigslist’s counsel in June, alleging violations of Craigslist’s Terms of Service.
In the lawsuit (PDF) filed in a San Francisco federal court, Craigslist charges PadMapper with copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, and unfair competition, among others. The lawsuit also names 3Taps, a San Francisco startup which openly scrapes Craigslist data and makes it available to other websites, and Does 1-25 as defendants.
The move seems rather odd for the for-profit company that has been a darling of the Bay Area Internet community for more than a decade. Most of us have used Craigslist to find all kinds of things, ranging from jobs to apartments and cars. (Heck, I found my cat on Craigslist’s free section seven years ago!) But if there’s one thing that has frustrated Internet users for years now, it's Craigslist’s lack of a proper interface, which these sites have attempted to bring to the fore. (...)
In an e-mail to Ars sent just after this article originally posted, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder wrote that he only found out about the suit on Tuesday, and is currently looking for counsel now.
"3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there." (...)
“I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world,” he wrote. “Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.”
by Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica | Read more:
by Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica | Read more:
