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Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF

312 points by peter123 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- justonepost 11y ago
  Not at all! You should be allowed to create an usage agreement on anyone who connects to your service.
- jahewson 11y ago
  "Public domain" refers to old works whose copyright has expired (in the U.S. that's 100 years since author death). That's not applicable here. Edit: parent comment prior to deletion had said that websites should be public domain.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Also not relevant here because Padmapper was taking data from Craiglist (and presenting it in their own format), and copyright only covers creative works, not raw data. See Feist v. Rural and friends. This was a CFAA case. If parent wanted to say that all publicly-accessible web pages should be considered legally scrapeable without triggering federal cybercrime legislation ... sure, I think that's a reasonable point of view, and roughly the EFF's point of view in this case. If, in the process of scraping and reusing data, you are infringing copyright (or breaking a civil contract, or whatever), that can be dealt with on its own, not by criminalizing the scraping.
    - tmarthal 11y ago
      That Feist v Rural case is interesting. The Feist Corp were not able to copyright telephone listings. I wonder if the telephone company itself could have laid claim to their copyright though.
lotharbot 11y ago
Previous discussion of CL's suit against 3taps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 The court ruling is at http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denying-Renewed-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi... and is surprisingly readable.
justonepost 11y ago
Craigslist had to sue or otherwise anyone could scrap data from Craigslist, whether they were making "Craigslist more valuable" or not. Simple as that.
- geofft 11y ago
  I'm not caught up on this case, but, 1. Why is that? I think the most relevant field of US law with that sort of provision is trademark law, which shouldn't have been at issue here at all (3taps and Padmapper were not pretending to be Craigslist or authorized by Craigslist). Copyright law, which is sorta relevant, does not have such a provision. If your song gets pirated, you can sue only the pirates named Fred without losing your right to sue. The CFAA, which is definitely relevant here, does not have such a provision: JSTOR does not have their hands full with CFAA cases against everyone who ever sent an article to a colleague or friend. 2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? That would have sidestepped any such concern, without setting a precedent that everyone else must get API access. I think it's pretty clear from this case that they did not want to see Padmapper exist, and regardless of whether they were obligated to sue and try to shut them down, they clearly wanted to sue and shut this particular application down.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    > 2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? Maybe they didn't want to?
    - briandear 11y ago
      I don't know why this was downvoted, but this was obviously the case. CL had no interest in these 3d party sites. It's their data and their terms of use, so there really aren't any debatable points. Nobody has a right to CL data unless they explicitly provide that right. If I were CL, I wouldn't have give Padmapper an API either; their arrogance was astounding. They had no respect for the CL terms of use. They built an entire company around a knowing violation of their data source's terms of use. The Terms said, "you can do X," Padmapper did "X" then complained when CL said no. It doesn't matter what X was, Padmapper just knowingly did it anyway. They had the intent to violate the Terms of Use.
rurounijones 11y ago
Cynical part of me sees all the people saying "EFF should give it back to show integrity" and wondering if that wasn't the hope all along from craigslist. I would hope that EFF does not give it back but uses it to continue the good fight or donate it to another, unrelated, charity if they believe the money is tainted.
- justonepost 11y ago
  Everyone is just frustrated that Craigslist charges so little for their services and hasn't tried to monetize it in some abuse way like a typical capitalistic company would.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days. I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent. Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring. In the long run I want to cover every occupation in which one can find a job by applying through the employer's website. I won't monetize it in any way. Or perhaps I could say I will monetize it by offering my consulting services through my website, as I always have. Providing free content on my site results in sales leads.
    - eru 11y ago
      > Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring. You know most people make compensation part of their decision on who to work for / who to hire? You can get money out of any kind of hiring..
      - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
        I don't regard that as corruption. What I do regard as corruption, is when a recruiter convinces a manager that they can find qualified staff, then expect thirty grand in commissions by placing someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started,
justonepost 11y ago
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.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  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.
- onedev 11y ago
  Someone CAN do it better AND for free. Check out Nextdoor.com. I've been using it for a while and it's better in literally every single way. It's now just a matter of time while they scale.
  - kimmel 11y ago
    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.
    - dogweather 11y ago
      Yep. Nextdoor often barely works for me, with the browser trying to load some asset or other.
    - onedev 11y ago
      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.
methehack 11y ago
Craigslist is a great example of how network effects can be leveraged to form the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage. The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users. Newmark knows this and that's why he sues anyone who sniffs in the general direction of his data. I think he's a self-serving fink.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  > The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users The product is bare bones, but it works just as well as it ever has, which is a heck of a lot better than many web applications from the last 10 years, loaded down with animations and piles of tracking javascript and auto-playing video ads and broken reimplementations of standard browser features. Personally I find it works better for me than most google web properties since about 2008 (e.g. the new versions of gmail and google maps), better than recent versions of facebook, better than yelp, better than a lot of current newspaper websites, etc. There’s something to be said for plain html websites. I do wish craigslist would let other people scrape their pages and provide alternative user interfaces though. Pad mapper was a great help when I needed to look for an apartment several years ago.
  - methehack 11y ago
    I'll grant you that the basic functionality works. It ought to given that they've barely changed it in like 15 years. It's fine if they don't want to change it, but they've stifled -- through legal channels -- many frustrated attempts to enhance the product -- like cease and desists to dude's doing simple mapping visualizations for example. I think they're bullies with their position and it has served no one but craigslist. The network effects they wield create monopoly-like conditions and they use the court's to retain them. [edit for grammar which alas is not quite perfect yet]
    - yo-code-sucks 11y ago
      Craigslist is the one serving the content, and Content is not free, so that point is a bit of shit.
res0nat0r 11y ago
Can't we just ban Techdirt submissions for their terrible and obviously biased reporting? Everything from them is blatantly one sided and not even trying to actually represent the truth. From 3Taps own website right now: "As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, which supported 3taps' position on the CFAA in this litigation, and continues to do great work for Internet freedom"
- higherpurpose 11y ago
  That doesn't sound like a "donation", though? At the very least Craiglist tried to portray it as something they're doing out of the goodness of their hearts.
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    Giving million bucks to someone else sounds pretty good to me and fits every definition of donation I've ever heard of.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    Giving away a $1M settlement is clearly a donation, and it's "out of the goodness of their hearts" when compared to the obvious alternative: keeping the money.
    - em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
      I wouldn't consider the result of legal settlement to be a "donation". A donation is a voluntary transfer of money. Had craigslist received $1M from a settlement and then voluntarily sent EFF $1M without being specified to in the legal settlement, then that would be a donation. The correct interpretation is that the $1M transfer is part of a legal settlement to resolve a lawsuit. I haven't followed this lawsuit too closely, but it sounds like craigslist might not have had a "open-and-closed" case, hence the need to offer these amenable terms to sweeten the terms of surrender, and thus hasten the resolution. "As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, "
downandout 11y ago
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.
- discardorama 11y ago
  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?
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    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.
    - spacefight 11y ago
      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.
    - jakobegger 11y ago
      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.
      - totalcookie 11y ago
polemic 11y ago
Can someone explain why, exactly, EFF is getting a payment as part of this settlement? Was it a stipulation of the settlement made by the defendants?
- dogweather 11y ago
  It's unclear: the article makes claims that can't be substantiated: * The legal documents don't mention any payment (required or otherwise) to EFF. * The EFF doesn't mention any payment (required or otherwise) from CL. * Only 3taps' own blog mentions this, which the article quotes extensively without attribution.
zaidf 11y ago
It would be poetic justice if EFF dedicates this money to fighting future lawsuits from CL. I don't think we have seen the last of this.
suprgeek 11y ago
While there maybe subtleties in "public access by humans" over "automated scraping" - these belong in the "business dispute" side of the fence. Using the CFAA is by definition - playing hardball - it includes Criminal Penalties in some cases. What really amuses me is that in the Tweet highlighted, Craig is indeed implying that it is his money going to the EFF - who Opposed him in the legal case that lead to the money. So he should be called out for egregious bullying - using the threat of Criminal Sanction to get his way. If an HN-friendly business (whatever that is) pulled the same move it would also be equally worthy of opprobrium.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Craigslist continues to destroy its competition by maintaining its walled garden. This wouldn't bug me as much if CL was actually serious about improving its user experience, which has more or less been the same for the past decade (just bad enough to be usable). I don't mind it being spartan - but that aside there are usability issues. One simple example is the reason things like PadMapper and HousingMaps became popular. Another example is that their categories are often hard to filter through. Lastly, there are trust issues - something like "connect to Facebook" would really go a long way in some transactions. If anyone ever needed proof that monopolies crush innovation, this would be a good starting point.
  - eli 11y ago
    I don't see the connection between bullying being acceptable and improving a site's UX. If it's wrong then it's wrong regardless of whether or not they steal competitor's ideas when they crush them.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    I don't have a problem with CL. It's dirt simple and it works. It reminds me of the simplicity of newspaper want ads.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      We tend not to know what we're missing until someone gets sued for trying to give it to us.
briandear 11y ago
Tangential to the main issue but Tech Dirt needs lessons on basic journalism. CFAA should have been defined at first reference. It's just bad writing. I had no idea what CFAA meant until I Googled it. I wish these kinds of publications would learn what a style book is.
kev009 11y ago
Not very familiar with him but stumbled upon this a while ago and it's some of the worst business and personal advice I've ever seen: http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-mouth-shut.html http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-m.... I wondered if he has some screws loose after reading it. As someone deeply interested in UNIX history, it's also revisionist and dismissive of hard fought wins by people who don't cower like he did -- real UNIX is incredibly successful to this day.. SysV (Solaris/Illumos), BSD, etc.
- tdk 11y ago
  Thanks for posting this. The TL;DR version of this article is: > I was asked for my advice, there was a clear cut right answer, that would have been good for the company and good for the future of the internet, but would have upset my bosses. > Instead, I kept my mouth shut to help my career. This makes me "grown as a person" and "politically and socially clueful". No, it makes you a jerk. > btw, running craigslist is a "public service" and makes me a "philanthropist". So you've given away the $400 million you made off craigslist, then? No? Then you're a delusional jerk.
jasonkester 11y ago
This is really silly. Reading the article, it seems that: 1. Craigslist donated a bunch of money to somebody (which seems like a good thing) 2. Craigslist sued some company for scraping their data and using it in violation of their Terms of Service. And won a settlement. (which seems like a good thing) So in short, good job Craigslist. Why is the author so angry?
- chaostheory 11y ago
  > Why is the author so angry? Because you didn't really read the article (or possibly the article isn't well written but I understood it) 1. Your order of events is wrong. Craigslist sued. Won. Then used the proceeds from the lawsuit to donate. This isn't money earned normally. 2. The problem is the lawsuit itself. Craigslist is abusing a law that is meant to deal with hackers intruding on someone's private network. Visiting someone's publicly accessible website and access publicly accessible data is not intruding on someone else's network. Chances are other 3rd parties will now start to abuse this law. i.e. This somewhat reminds me of companies suing people for summarizing a news article into a blog post and linking back to the name original article. In this case, I believe the 3rd parties were creating embedded Google Maps based on the addresses found on Craigslist listing (because Craigslist pre-lawsuit refused to do so) and linking back to the original listing. TDLR Craigslist successfully stopped a company from fair use of their public content by accusing them of hacking into their network. Craigslist then donates some of the proceeds of lawsuit's 'damages' to the EFF.
  - jasonkester 11y ago
    But wait, you haven't added any new information. You've just re-stated the information in the article. So yes, they sued before donating. And yes, they used the proceeds. But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things. Even reading your comment (or its sibling that was posted during the same minute) gives enough information to come to that conclusion. Craigslist said "don't scrape our data". This other company scraped their data and used it to build their business, so Craigslist sued. That's exactly the world I'd like to live in.
Cyclone_ 11y ago
Craigslist has always been a sleazy company and didn't get serious about the violence that resulted from the postings on their site until massive public pressure. Craig Newark seems like someone who will put profit ahead of everything.
jrochkind1 11y ago
Quite odd that he'd donate money from a settlement to an organization that filed a brief _against him_ in the case. I wonder why he did that. Ah wait, I see, that was part of the settlement, the other businesses said they'd pay the penalty if he donated it to EFF and he agreed. Ha, that's something. Perhaps EFF should earmark his donation in a fund specifically dedicated to legal defense against any future CFAA suits filed by Craigslist?
elchief 11y ago
So basically our competitors can sue us now for browsing their websites?
pla3rhat3r 11y ago
What a shit show. From the surface it certainly feels like this is just money moving from one entity to another with Craig sort of taking credit for donating the money. There is clearly more to this story that the journalist either isn't disclosing or didn't find in their investigation. It's not to say Craig doesn't have $1M sitting around to give, and I'm sure he'd back the EFF, but this whole thing doesn't smell right.

312 points by peter123 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

justonepost 11y ago
Not at all! You should be allowed to create an usage agreement on anyone who connects to your service.
jahewson 11y ago
"Public domain" refers to old works whose copyright has expired (in the U.S. that's 100 years since author death). That's not applicable here. Edit: parent comment prior to deletion had said that websites should be public domain.
- geofft 11y ago
  Also not relevant here because Padmapper was taking data from Craiglist (and presenting it in their own format), and copyright only covers creative works, not raw data. See Feist v. Rural and friends. This was a CFAA case. If parent wanted to say that all publicly-accessible web pages should be considered legally scrapeable without triggering federal cybercrime legislation ... sure, I think that's a reasonable point of view, and roughly the EFF's point of view in this case. If, in the process of scraping and reusing data, you are infringing copyright (or breaking a civil contract, or whatever), that can be dealt with on its own, not by criminalizing the scraping.
  - tmarthal 11y ago
    That Feist v Rural case is interesting. The Feist Corp were not able to copyright telephone listings. I wonder if the telephone company itself could have laid claim to their copyright though.

lotharbot 11y ago

Previous discussion of CL's suit against 3taps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 The court ruling is at http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denying-Renewed-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi... and is surprisingly readable.

justonepost 11y ago

Craigslist had to sue or otherwise anyone could scrap data from Craigslist, whether they were making "Craigslist more valuable" or not. Simple as that.

geofft 11y ago
I'm not caught up on this case, but, 1. Why is that? I think the most relevant field of US law with that sort of provision is trademark law, which shouldn't have been at issue here at all (3taps and Padmapper were not pretending to be Craigslist or authorized by Craigslist). Copyright law, which is sorta relevant, does not have such a provision. If your song gets pirated, you can sue only the pirates named Fred without losing your right to sue. The CFAA, which is definitely relevant here, does not have such a provision: JSTOR does not have their hands full with CFAA cases against everyone who ever sent an article to a colleague or friend. 2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? That would have sidestepped any such concern, without setting a precedent that everyone else must get API access. I think it's pretty clear from this case that they did not want to see Padmapper exist, and regardless of whether they were obligated to sue and try to shut them down, they clearly wanted to sue and shut this particular application down.
- teacup50 11y ago
  > 2. What prevented Craigslist from giving a straightforward license and API to Padmapper? Maybe they didn't want to?
  - briandear 11y ago
    I don't know why this was downvoted, but this was obviously the case. CL had no interest in these 3d party sites. It's their data and their terms of use, so there really aren't any debatable points. Nobody has a right to CL data unless they explicitly provide that right. If I were CL, I wouldn't have give Padmapper an API either; their arrogance was astounding. They had no respect for the CL terms of use. They built an entire company around a knowing violation of their data source's terms of use. The Terms said, "you can do X," Padmapper did "X" then complained when CL said no. It doesn't matter what X was, Padmapper just knowingly did it anyway. They had the intent to violate the Terms of Use.

rurounijones 11y ago

Cynical part of me sees all the people saying "EFF should give it back to show integrity" and wondering if that wasn't the hope all along from craigslist. I would hope that EFF does not give it back but uses it to continue the good fight or donate it to another, unrelated, charity if they believe the money is tainted.

justonepost 11y ago
Everyone is just frustrated that Craigslist charges so little for their services and hasn't tried to monetize it in some abuse way like a typical capitalistic company would.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days. I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent. Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring. In the long run I want to cover every occupation in which one can find a job by applying through the employer's website. I won't monetize it in any way. Or perhaps I could say I will monetize it by offering my consulting services through my website, as I always have. Providing free content on my site results in sales leads.
  - eru 11y ago
    > Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring. You know most people make compensation part of their decision on who to work for / who to hire? You can get money out of any kind of hiring..
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      I don't regard that as corruption. What I do regard as corruption, is when a recruiter convinces a manager that they can find qualified staff, then expect thirty grand in commissions by placing someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started,

justonepost 11y ago

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.

Alex3917 11y ago
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.
onedev 11y ago
Someone CAN do it better AND for free. Check out Nextdoor.com. I've been using it for a while and it's better in literally every single way. It's now just a matter of time while they scale.
- kimmel 11y ago
  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.
  - dogweather 11y ago
    Yep. Nextdoor often barely works for me, with the browser trying to load some asset or other.
  - onedev 11y ago
    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.

methehack 11y ago

Craigslist is a great example of how network effects can be leveraged to form the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage. The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users. Newmark knows this and that's why he sues anyone who sniffs in the general direction of his data. I think he's a self-serving fink.

jacobolus 11y ago
> The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users The product is bare bones, but it works just as well as it ever has, which is a heck of a lot better than many web applications from the last 10 years, loaded down with animations and piles of tracking javascript and auto-playing video ads and broken reimplementations of standard browser features. Personally I find it works better for me than most google web properties since about 2008 (e.g. the new versions of gmail and google maps), better than recent versions of facebook, better than yelp, better than a lot of current newspaper websites, etc. There’s something to be said for plain html websites. I do wish craigslist would let other people scrape their pages and provide alternative user interfaces though. Pad mapper was a great help when I needed to look for an apartment several years ago.
- methehack 11y ago
  I'll grant you that the basic functionality works. It ought to given that they've barely changed it in like 15 years. It's fine if they don't want to change it, but they've stifled -- through legal channels -- many frustrated attempts to enhance the product -- like cease and desists to dude's doing simple mapping visualizations for example. I think they're bullies with their position and it has served no one but craigslist. The network effects they wield create monopoly-like conditions and they use the court's to retain them. [edit for grammar which alas is not quite perfect yet]
  - yo-code-sucks 11y ago
    Craigslist is the one serving the content, and Content is not free, so that point is a bit of shit.

res0nat0r 11y ago

Can't we just ban Techdirt submissions for their terrible and obviously biased reporting? Everything from them is blatantly one sided and not even trying to actually represent the truth. From 3Taps own website right now: "As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, which supported 3taps' position on the CFAA in this litigation, and continues to do great work for Internet freedom"

higherpurpose 11y ago
That doesn't sound like a "donation", though? At the very least Craiglist tried to portray it as something they're doing out of the goodness of their hearts.
- res0nat0r 11y ago
  Giving million bucks to someone else sounds pretty good to me and fits every definition of donation I've ever heard of.
- teacup50 11y ago
  Giving away a $1M settlement is clearly a donation, and it's "out of the goodness of their hearts" when compared to the obvious alternative: keeping the money.
  - em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
    I wouldn't consider the result of legal settlement to be a "donation". A donation is a voluntary transfer of money. Had craigslist received $1M from a settlement and then voluntarily sent EFF $1M without being specified to in the legal settlement, then that would be a donation. The correct interpretation is that the $1M transfer is part of a legal settlement to resolve a lawsuit. I haven't followed this lawsuit too closely, but it sounds like craigslist might not have had a "open-and-closed" case, hence the need to offer these amenable terms to sweeten the terms of surrender, and thus hasten the resolution. "As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, "

downandout 11y ago

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.

discardorama 11y ago
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?
- res0nat0r 11y ago
  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.
  - spacefight 11y ago
    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.
  - jakobegger 11y ago
    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.
    - totalcookie 11y ago

polemic 11y ago

Can someone explain why, exactly, EFF is getting a payment as part of this settlement? Was it a stipulation of the settlement made by the defendants?

dogweather 11y ago
It's unclear: the article makes claims that can't be substantiated: * The legal documents don't mention any payment (required or otherwise) to EFF. * The EFF doesn't mention any payment (required or otherwise) from CL. * Only 3taps' own blog mentions this, which the article quotes extensively without attribution.

zaidf 11y ago

It would be poetic justice if EFF dedicates this money to fighting future lawsuits from CL. I don't think we have seen the last of this.

suprgeek 11y ago

While there maybe subtleties in "public access by humans" over "automated scraping" - these belong in the "business dispute" side of the fence. Using the CFAA is by definition - playing hardball - it includes Criminal Penalties in some cases. What really amuses me is that in the Tweet highlighted, Craig is indeed implying that it is his money going to the EFF - who Opposed him in the legal case that lead to the money. So he should be called out for egregious bullying - using the threat of Criminal Sanction to get his way. If an HN-friendly business (whatever that is) pulled the same move it would also be equally worthy of opprobrium.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Craigslist continues to destroy its competition by maintaining its walled garden. This wouldn't bug me as much if CL was actually serious about improving its user experience, which has more or less been the same for the past decade (just bad enough to be usable). I don't mind it being spartan - but that aside there are usability issues. One simple example is the reason things like PadMapper and HousingMaps became popular. Another example is that their categories are often hard to filter through. Lastly, there are trust issues - something like "connect to Facebook" would really go a long way in some transactions. If anyone ever needed proof that monopolies crush innovation, this would be a good starting point.
- eli 11y ago
  I don't see the connection between bullying being acceptable and improving a site's UX. If it's wrong then it's wrong regardless of whether or not they steal competitor's ideas when they crush them.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I don't have a problem with CL. It's dirt simple and it works. It reminds me of the simplicity of newspaper want ads.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    We tend not to know what we're missing until someone gets sued for trying to give it to us.

briandear 11y ago

Tangential to the main issue but Tech Dirt needs lessons on basic journalism. CFAA should have been defined at first reference. It's just bad writing. I had no idea what CFAA meant until I Googled it. I wish these kinds of publications would learn what a style book is.

kev009 11y ago

Not very familiar with him but stumbled upon this a while ago and it's some of the worst business and personal advice I've ever seen: http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-mouth-shut.html http://craigconnects.org/2014/12/knowing-when-to-keep-your-m.... I wondered if he has some screws loose after reading it. As someone deeply interested in UNIX history, it's also revisionist and dismissive of hard fought wins by people who don't cower like he did -- real UNIX is incredibly successful to this day.. SysV (Solaris/Illumos), BSD, etc.

tdk 11y ago
Thanks for posting this. The TL;DR version of this article is: > I was asked for my advice, there was a clear cut right answer, that would have been good for the company and good for the future of the internet, but would have upset my bosses. > Instead, I kept my mouth shut to help my career. This makes me "grown as a person" and "politically and socially clueful". No, it makes you a jerk. > btw, running craigslist is a "public service" and makes me a "philanthropist". So you've given away the $400 million you made off craigslist, then? No? Then you're a delusional jerk.

jasonkester 11y ago

This is really silly. Reading the article, it seems that: 1. Craigslist donated a bunch of money to somebody (which seems like a good thing) 2. Craigslist sued some company for scraping their data and using it in violation of their Terms of Service. And won a settlement. (which seems like a good thing) So in short, good job Craigslist. Why is the author so angry?

chaostheory 11y ago
> Why is the author so angry? Because you didn't really read the article (or possibly the article isn't well written but I understood it) 1. Your order of events is wrong. Craigslist sued. Won. Then used the proceeds from the lawsuit to donate. This isn't money earned normally. 2. The problem is the lawsuit itself. Craigslist is abusing a law that is meant to deal with hackers intruding on someone's private network. Visiting someone's publicly accessible website and access publicly accessible data is not intruding on someone else's network. Chances are other 3rd parties will now start to abuse this law. i.e. This somewhat reminds me of companies suing people for summarizing a news article into a blog post and linking back to the name original article. In this case, I believe the 3rd parties were creating embedded Google Maps based on the addresses found on Craigslist listing (because Craigslist pre-lawsuit refused to do so) and linking back to the original listing. TDLR Craigslist successfully stopped a company from fair use of their public content by accusing them of hacking into their network. Craigslist then donates some of the proceeds of lawsuit's 'damages' to the EFF.
- jasonkester 11y ago
  But wait, you haven't added any new information. You've just re-stated the information in the article. So yes, they sued before donating. And yes, they used the proceeds. But that makes no difference to the fact that both were good things. Even reading your comment (or its sibling that was posted during the same minute) gives enough information to come to that conclusion. Craigslist said "don't scrape our data". This other company scraped their data and used it to build their business, so Craigslist sued. That's exactly the world I'd like to live in.

Cyclone_ 11y ago

Craigslist has always been a sleazy company and didn't get serious about the violence that resulted from the postings on their site until massive public pressure. Craig Newark seems like someone who will put profit ahead of everything.

jrochkind1 11y ago

Quite odd that he'd donate money from a settlement to an organization that filed a brief _against him_ in the case. I wonder why he did that. Ah wait, I see, that was part of the settlement, the other businesses said they'd pay the penalty if he donated it to EFF and he agreed. Ha, that's something. Perhaps EFF should earmark his donation in a fund specifically dedicated to legal defense against any future CFAA suits filed by Craigslist?

elchief 11y ago

So basically our competitors can sue us now for browsing their websites?

pla3rhat3r 11y ago

What a shit show. From the surface it certainly feels like this is just money moving from one entity to another with Craig sort of taking credit for donating the money. There is clearly more to this story that the journalist either isn't disclosing or didn't find in their investigation. It's not to say Craig doesn't have $1M sitting around to give, and I'm sure he'd back the EFF, but this whole thing doesn't smell right.