But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist.
Most users use Craignlist under the assumption it being a "public good" site. If someone is not draining the bandwidth, the public data in Craiglist should be perfectly sharable.
It's very clear that Craiglist had been betraying their user's trust for them being "public good" company. The public good companies don't hire top notch lawyers to go after copyright violations.
>But, it's NOT Craiglist's data! The data was entered by users to Craiglist in order to share with others. The data is owned by users, not Craiglist.
So what? Lets assume it is your/mine/somebody's data. When we post stuff to Craiglist we give Craigslist a license to use it. We --by the ToS explicitly DON'T and even ignoring the ToS still-- implicitly DON'T give Padmapper a license to use our data. Padmapper was still using data it had no license to use, regardless of who that license should come from.
Still not a copyright violation. You can't copyright a fact.
I write a post that says "I am renting an apartment at 221B Baker Street."
Padmapper copies it.
My post is not copyrightable, so (regardless of what you think of the copyrightability of a collection of facts), Padmapper has not violated the copyright on my single post because it doesn't exist.
If I were to include some original creative text that was copyrightable, Padmapper is still fine, because they only copy the facts of the post not the full text.
This would be a more compelling argument if you could find one real user who would prefer their data stay on craigslist and not appear on Padmapper. It's fairly safe to say that people who post to craigslist actively desire their ad to be viewed by as many people as possible.
Well, craigslist's TOS says explicitly that you give them the right to your post, both to use and defend from scrapers. I guess you could argue that the users aren't aware of this, but I'd be surprised if better publicity of this would have a significant effect on the number of people posting to craigslist.
Most users use Craignlist under the assumption it being a "public good" site. If someone is not draining the bandwidth, the public data in Craiglist should be perfectly sharable.
It's very clear that Craiglist had been betraying their user's trust for them being "public good" company. The public good companies don't hire top notch lawyers to go after copyright violations.