But now that 3Taps has found an ingenious way to get at the data with zero extra bandwidth cost to Craigslist (by retrieving it from the Google cache rather than CL itself), it's clear that what Craigslist really dislikes is competition.
While Craigslist is probably within their legal rights here, this case shows that for all their talk about their benevolent aims, Craigslist is no different from other companies.
When I think of Padmapper, I think of the naughtiness:
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."
Craigslist is probably within their legal rights here
I would really call this into question for the copyright claims. The key claim is copyright infringement, and the listings on Craigslist are almost certainly unprotected, much like telephone directory listings. They are statements of fact rather than creative works.
Craigslist may attempt to claim copyright over reproduction of their database as a whole (compilation), but the Supreme Court has ruled that in order to be eligible the compilation must be "original in its selection, coordination, and arrangement", and Craigslist can hardly claim that.
The breach of contract claims may be stronger though. The pages on the Google cache presumably still contain the ToS, and if they apply (who knows?) then PadMapper's use of Craigslist would likely constitute a breach. A ruling on this would be very interesting.
Hm, would you not say that what Craigslist really dislikes is their competition piggy-backing off their data? Craigslist seemed quite happy with the existing situation until Padmapper launched their own listing service.
Though I agree that it's not in the spirit of a .org, if such concept exists.
>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data
There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
The posts on CL are no more "Craigslist data" than videos on YouTube are "Google data". The data is submitted by the users for the express purpose of being seen by other people. Does anyone seriously argue that users listing flats on CL do not want their listing found by other avenues? It is clear that Padmapper is providing a service beneficial to both suppliers and consumers of rental properties, and CL is using the police power of the state to prevent that benefit. Why they're doing this is still a mystery to me.
I agree! On top of that, the ability to free-ride off of other's data without permission could be seen as an attempt to stiffle innovation as well. Why should I take the time to build something when (a) others can come along and use my data for free and take away my market share or (b) I can just wait a year and scrape the data off of somebody else and not do as much work.
It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
Because we're also a community of apartment seekers, and Padmapper makes Craigslist's data many times more useful. It's fine if Craigslist wants us to use their mapping service, but it doesn't exist yet. It's a purely selfish argument, but shutting down Padmapper does nothing but make our lives more difficult.
> its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data
Is it Craigslist's data? Does Craigslist own the posts that caused women to be murdered and stolen property to be sold? If they own that data, then they must be culpable (to some degree) for these bad acts.
I interpret this different. I certainly think that Craigslist is stifling innovation (perhaps purposefully, perhaps not), but simply stifling innovation is not illegal.
Craiglist is being known for not "innovating", at least when it comes to their platform, design etc. Heck, Craig himself said he tries to implement changes as little and as rarely as possible, because he himself does not truly know what makes Craiglist to constantly "tick" year after year.
Im sure that's why their try this lowball trick to defend themselves and show it to judge "hey we want to innovate, and Craiglist does not want to".
Stifling or not stifling, it's always a huge risk to build your business around someone else's technology, especially one that has a track record of not cooperating with third parties.
> I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
Well, for one thing: different ideas about what constitutes fair game for property/control claims.
Not everything can be copyrighted or patented, and specifically, it's really not clear that a rental/for sale/wanted listing is actually a copyrightable work.
If that weren't enough, though, there's also not really a clear difference between what Padmapper does and a search engine -- it doesn't "steal" listings and put them wholesale on their site without attribution, it provides a geographic search that yields a limited digest and then points users to the original source.
I'm also pretty confident that if it was the opposite (PadMapper suing Craigslist for using PadMapper data), then most people would be cheering on PadMapper.
"(Craigslist) said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."
I don't know the legal merits of either party's position, but from an ethical perspective, I tend to side with Craigslist here. Dissatisfaction with a commercial site's UI is not just cause for using their data without permission, particularly if they had made an effort to offer a licensing agreement, whatever the terms might have been.
My logical brain says that suing Padmapper is perfectly reasonable. My emotional brain is crying at the idea of using raw Craigslist ads to find an apartment the next time I move to a new city.
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.
This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, but it brings up the 'easy problem' / 'hard problem' (E/H-P) conundrum quite nicely.
The conundrum is that it is 'easy' to take an existing, quality data source, and re-skin it for broader market appeal. This is something that Craigslist should be doing but perhaps through poor management are not. It is 'hard' to take a conceptual model of skinning and building a quality data source behind it.
As I said elsewhere, the PadMapper guys might have taken this to Craigslist and said "Look what we can do with your data, lets make happy music together." and then debated the terms. Or they could take their UX to the venture capital world and say "Look at this cool product we could build if we had access to a database with Craig list's quality" and debate cap tables and dilution (assuming they got to that stage of a term sheet).
But they chose the third route, "Lets see how long we can get away with this..." and the timer on that just ran out.
Sadly, this third path makes the first two paths much harder. Craigslist already sees them as the 'enemy' and VCs will see them as a team that makes poor choices. Both views make it harder (but certainly not impossible) to consummate a deal. However, from the blog and from previous postings here it seems they made those choices with their eyes open.
With regard to the re-skin there was quite some external interest in this around 2009. Wired Magazine asked several leading designers to present their version of Craigslist redux.
I find this sort of thing very frustrating to read:
"The search tool is antiquated, the images are poor or nonexistent, locations of listings are hardly dependable, and you can forget about an integrated way to save anything for later reference. There is a litany of shortcomings that come with the Craigslist apartment search; they are many and they are painful..."
If you don't like the site, don't like the UI, and can't stand the UX, then don't use the site. Nobody is forcing you to search for an apartment on CL. Nobody is forcing owners to list apartments on CL.
And so now we get to the meat ...
"...Your site is chock-full of data I need..."
Ahh...data you NEED.
So here's the thing. If you truly need the data, then you need Craigslist and you have an obligation to use it the way they (and only they) want you to use it. If you don't like the way they want you to use it, there are several choices:
* Go work for them and convince them to improve it.
* Build a better mousetrap.
The former probably won't succeed, so the latter seems to be the way to go.
Look, there's nothing preventing landlords from listing their apartments on Craigslist AND your new Craigslist replacement/improvement. They're not locked in. If they were, that would be a whole different discussion - then we can talk about anti-competitive, innovation-stifling behavior. But that's not the case - the only reason people list apartments on CL is because it works. Despite the bad UI. Hence the reason CL hasn't changed it.
So it's the job of some enterprising entrepreneur not only ro build a better mousetrap, but convince people to use it. Until that happens, as much as I too dislike the Craigslist UI, I can't say I support PadMapper on this one.
If you don't like the site, don't like the UI, and can't stand the UX, then don't use the site. Nobody is forcing you to search for an apartment on CL. Nobody is forcing owners to list apartments on CL.
Apartments aren't a fungible item. If I'm looking for an apartment in a certain area and 75% of the apartments in that area are only being listed on Craigslist, then how can I realistically "choose" to use another avenue for apartment listings?
Look, there's nothing preventing landlords from listing their apartments on Craigslist AND your new Craigslist replacement/improvement.
There are huge barriers preventing landlords from listing their apartments outside of craigslist. Nothing is as popular, so why waste the time? They don't have hours to scour the internet looking for alternatives, nor do they probably want to have to manage listings at many difference sites.
> If you truly need the data, then you need Craigslist and you have an obligation to use it the way they (and only they) want you to use it.
This is what we call a monopoly. Many people (apartment hunters in this context) need to use Craigslist because there are no viable alternatives. Just like you have to pay your local utility for water or power -- there are alternatives, but not viable ones.
And a two-sided monopoly is a very real monopoly.
The difference is that other monopolies get regulated; Craigslist is not. Given their current behavior, I'd strongly support a law that explicitly denies craigslist any exclusive right to their listing data.
> If you don't like the site, don't like the UI, and can't stand the UX, then don't use the site. Nobody is forcing you to search for an apartment on CL. Nobody is forcing owners to list apartments on CL.
Yes they are being "forced" to list on CL, because as much as you hate the UX, UI, etc., that's where the buyers are. And as much as the buyers hate the site, that's where the sellers are. I hate CL, but I was forced to use it because lock-in makes it impossible for anyone else to compete.
> Look, there's nothing preventing landlords from listing their apartments on Craigslist AND your new Craigslist replacement/improvement. They're not locked in.
That's disingenuous. Craigslist is pretty much the only game in town in many places. Let's say you need to find a person with a specific need, willing to pay $2000 a month. If you don't find this person, you have to pay the $2000 a month. How do you feel about not using Craigslist now?
If they want to make some UI that they like, then they can do it. If they want to offer this to others, they can do it.
If they want to load the data into some SQL database, they can do it.
If they want split the data into some other format using csplit and load into some other faster database, they can do it.
If they want to extract a portion of a raw file and just use agrep on that, they can do it.
The point is that UI is a personal decision.
Because some people do not like CL's bare bones UI doesn't give them the right to do anything. Because some people don't like bloated and clumsy web interfaces and prefer text commands doesn't give them the right to do anything either.
But people can't be stopped from making personal decisions about how to process data. Public data.
It's funny how some websites think they "own" data that is given to them. Do they "need" this data? Yes, they do.
Here's a nugget from the article which I didn't hear anything about in the previous Padmapper postings and chat here on HN:
"The company said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
I can't say that I'm that surprised; Padmapper wrote a whole blog post about how they were adding Craigslist support back to their site after being sent a C&D by Craigslist.
It's a shame for the guy behind Padmapper, but hopefully there'll be a lesson learnt about knowing which fights are worth picking versus knowing when to move on.
Somehow Google managed to overcome Yahoo and Altavista without scraping their data. And look at something like GumTree in the UK, which has always been miles ahead of Craigslist - no first mover advantage taken up there. Plus, GumTree's design has been equally woeful over the years.
"You're not wrong, [Craigslist], you're just an asshole."
I don't know who's legally right, but I've got no sympathy for Craigslist. They've got a monopoly on the data (whether right or wrong) and refuse to either build a decent UI for consumers or let other people do so.
That sounds bad, but I think you can't know how infuriating it really is until you've tried to find housing in a town where CL is the only real option and where demand far exceeds supply (where you spend many, many hours on the effort because of intense demand-side competition).
Just because you don't like the interface, does not give you license to steal their data. I think HN is fairly ugly, but that doesn't mean I have a right to scrape the site in order to reproduce a slightly better looking, for-profit clone. At least not without PG's express permission.
Yahoo search would be a hell of a lot better if they could just scrape results from Google, but thankfully they lack the misguided sense of entitlement that Padmapper seems to suffer from.
> The lawsuit raises questions about who should be able to use the vast amount of user-created data hosted on a site like Craigslist.
No, it really doesn't. This isn't going to be a long, exciting case challenging the underpinnings of copyright law and server terms of services. Padmapper isn't that company.
Commenters here make this sound like an open and shut case in favor of Craigslist. IANAL, so could someone explain why Google's index of material covered by copyright is ok and PadMapper's is not?
When you can't beat them, sue them into the ground.
Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it. The alternatives somehow manage to be even more spectacularly useless by over-designing their apps and cluttering them up with junk.
Padmapper is one of the few that does what they're supposed to do, and it's not even an optimal implementation of this sort of thing.
> Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it.
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.
Padmapper is the best apartment rental interface out there. The author has been single handedly working on this for 3-4 years and constantly improving his system.
Legally he might not have been in the right but we should be helping him out not uselessly debating and casting judgement.
If theres anyone who exmplifies the true spirit of Hacker News it would be the author of PadMapper.
> Legally he might not have been in the right but we should be helping him out not uselessly debating and casting judgement.
If he's not "legally not in the right," why should I be helping him (doesn't that imply casting a judgement - that PadMapper is elevated above CraigsList because it's "the best apartment rental interface our there")?
What if the tables were turned and CraigsList was violating PadMapper's TOS? Would you be willing to help CraigsList (they serve more than only apartment listings)?
Should somebody be rewarded, even if (legally) not in the right, just because he/she is a hard worker/smarty pants/exemplifies the True Hacker Spirit?
I often wonder if there is some sort of unwritten clause that You-Must-Pull-For-The-Underdog to join Hacker News? (In the name of Divine Disruption, of course.)
Padmapper ought to do a better job of leveraging this publicity. Apartment season is in full swing in college towns across the country and they need to push really hard to get the word out about Padlister: in particular, the fact that it will cross-post to Craigslist automatically (so you don't lose any viewers). This doesn't matter for realtors - they already have systems to autospam Craiglist. But it does matter to self-listers. They could get good traction targeting roommate listers and seekers as a way to build organic listings and eyeballs. Create a viral campaign. I would share it, and I know plenty of other people who would because Padmapper has made such a difference.
What's it like to work as Craigslist and read this stuff? How could you be excited to come to work every day knowing that network effects have carved a deep moat around a site that people describe as "an exercise in torture"?
This is absolute bullshit. Craigslist is located in San Francisco, and they should be intimately aware of how fucking difficult it is to find an apartment in this city with Craigslist's garbage interface.
Are there any Craigslist employees reading this? Would any of you like a full time job sorting through the cesspool that is your apartment listings page? Oh, you wouldn't? I don't blame you, because that's my job right now, and PadMapper is the only thing helping me preserve what's left of my sanity.
Do a better job than them or shut the fuck up. Stop hurting people by trying to shut PadMapper down.
[+] [-] pg|13 years ago|reply
http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-...
But now that 3Taps has found an ingenious way to get at the data with zero extra bandwidth cost to Craigslist (by retrieving it from the Google cache rather than CL itself), it's clear that what Craigslist really dislikes is competition.
While Craigslist is probably within their legal rights here, this case shows that for all their talk about their benevolent aims, Craigslist is no different from other companies.
[+] [-] juiceandjuice|13 years ago|reply
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."
[+] [-] jahewson|13 years ago|reply
I would really call this into question for the copyright claims. The key claim is copyright infringement, and the listings on Craigslist are almost certainly unprotected, much like telephone directory listings. They are statements of fact rather than creative works.
Craigslist may attempt to claim copyright over reproduction of their database as a whole (compilation), but the Supreme Court has ruled that in order to be eligible the compilation must be "original in its selection, coordination, and arrangement", and Craigslist can hardly claim that.
The breach of contract claims may be stronger though. The pages on the Google cache presumably still contain the ToS, and if they apply (who knows?) then PadMapper's use of Craigslist would likely constitute a breach. A ruling on this would be very interesting.
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
Hm, would you not say that what Craigslist really dislikes is their competition piggy-backing off their data? Craigslist seemed quite happy with the existing situation until Padmapper launched their own listing service.
Though I agree that it's not in the spirit of a .org, if such concept exists.
[+] [-] vellum|13 years ago|reply
"folks, please remember, #craigslist community feedback massively against the use of their stuff for the profit of others."
https://twitter.com/craignewmark/status/217323728260972544
[+] [-] Maascamp|13 years ago|reply
>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data
There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.
[+] [-] ataggart|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jetti|13 years ago|reply
It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
[+] [-] praxulus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanDrake|13 years ago|reply
Is it Craigslist's data? Does Craigslist own the posts that caused women to be murdered and stolen property to be sold? If they own that data, then they must be culpable (to some degree) for these bad acts.
If they own it, they are now more than just a service provider (IMO) and can no longer be protected by the DCA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply
/pedant
[+] [-] baddox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|13 years ago|reply
Im sure that's why their try this lowball trick to defend themselves and show it to judge "hey we want to innovate, and Craiglist does not want to".
But sure its not their business what CL does...
[+] [-] slantyyz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwweston|13 years ago|reply
Well, for one thing: different ideas about what constitutes fair game for property/control claims.
Not everything can be copyrighted or patented, and specifically, it's really not clear that a rental/for sale/wanted listing is actually a copyrightable work.
If that weren't enough, though, there's also not really a clear difference between what Padmapper does and a search engine -- it doesn't "steal" listings and put them wholesale on their site without attribution, it provides a geographic search that yields a limited digest and then points users to the original source.
[+] [-] adestefan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaonashi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|13 years ago|reply
But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."
I don't know the legal merits of either party's position, but from an ethical perspective, I tend to side with Craigslist here. Dissatisfaction with a commercial site's UI is not just cause for using their data without permission, particularly if they had made an effort to offer a licensing agreement, whatever the terms might have been.
[+] [-] patdennis|13 years ago|reply
I move to a new city every year, usually on short notice, and I often go into the process of apartment hunting with no knowledge of local neighborhoods, the public transportation system, or general geography. Without Padmapper, the process would be unbearable.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
The conundrum is that it is 'easy' to take an existing, quality data source, and re-skin it for broader market appeal. This is something that Craigslist should be doing but perhaps through poor management are not. It is 'hard' to take a conceptual model of skinning and building a quality data source behind it.
As I said elsewhere, the PadMapper guys might have taken this to Craigslist and said "Look what we can do with your data, lets make happy music together." and then debated the terms. Or they could take their UX to the venture capital world and say "Look at this cool product we could build if we had access to a database with Craig list's quality" and debate cap tables and dilution (assuming they got to that stage of a term sheet).
But they chose the third route, "Lets see how long we can get away with this..." and the timer on that just ran out.
Sadly, this third path makes the first two paths much harder. Craigslist already sees them as the 'enemy' and VCs will see them as a team that makes poor choices. Both views make it harder (but certainly not impossible) to consummate a deal. However, from the blog and from previous postings here it seems they made those choices with their eyes open.
[+] [-] learc83|13 years ago|reply
But that's the thing. It isn't their data. They specifically say so in their TOS. The copyright belongs to the user.
You can't say the listing belongs to the user (to protect you from liability) on one hand, and then say the data belongs to craigslist on the other.
They could always do what map companies have done forever to prevent copyright. Facts can't be copyrighted so map makers insert fictional cities.
If someone copies the map they are copying the fictional city and thus violating their copyright.
Craigslist could add a fictional listing here and there that they do own the copyright to.
[+] [-] DASD|13 years ago|reply
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
An article in the same interest, "Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess" ( http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_... ).
[+] [-] erichocean|13 years ago|reply
CL just put them on the map in a big way as being "Craigslist with a good UI" -- so good, they had to sue. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
[+] [-] nlh|13 years ago|reply
"The search tool is antiquated, the images are poor or nonexistent, locations of listings are hardly dependable, and you can forget about an integrated way to save anything for later reference. There is a litany of shortcomings that come with the Craigslist apartment search; they are many and they are painful..."
If you don't like the site, don't like the UI, and can't stand the UX, then don't use the site. Nobody is forcing you to search for an apartment on CL. Nobody is forcing owners to list apartments on CL.
And so now we get to the meat ...
"...Your site is chock-full of data I need..."
Ahh...data you NEED.
So here's the thing. If you truly need the data, then you need Craigslist and you have an obligation to use it the way they (and only they) want you to use it. If you don't like the way they want you to use it, there are several choices:
* Go work for them and convince them to improve it. * Build a better mousetrap.
The former probably won't succeed, so the latter seems to be the way to go.
Look, there's nothing preventing landlords from listing their apartments on Craigslist AND your new Craigslist replacement/improvement. They're not locked in. If they were, that would be a whole different discussion - then we can talk about anti-competitive, innovation-stifling behavior. But that's not the case - the only reason people list apartments on CL is because it works. Despite the bad UI. Hence the reason CL hasn't changed it.
So it's the job of some enterprising entrepreneur not only ro build a better mousetrap, but convince people to use it. Until that happens, as much as I too dislike the Craigslist UI, I can't say I support PadMapper on this one.
[+] [-] Goronmon|13 years ago|reply
Apartments aren't a fungible item. If I'm looking for an apartment in a certain area and 75% of the apartments in that area are only being listed on Craigslist, then how can I realistically "choose" to use another avenue for apartment listings?
Look, there's nothing preventing landlords from listing their apartments on Craigslist AND your new Craigslist replacement/improvement.
There are huge barriers preventing landlords from listing their apartments outside of craigslist. Nothing is as popular, so why waste the time? They don't have hours to scour the internet looking for alternatives, nor do they probably want to have to manage listings at many difference sites.
[+] [-] usaar333|13 years ago|reply
This is what we call a monopoly. Many people (apartment hunters in this context) need to use Craigslist because there are no viable alternatives. Just like you have to pay your local utility for water or power -- there are alternatives, but not viable ones.
And a two-sided monopoly is a very real monopoly.
The difference is that other monopolies get regulated; Craigslist is not. Given their current behavior, I'd strongly support a law that explicitly denies craigslist any exclusive right to their listing data.
[+] [-] crazygringo|13 years ago|reply
Yes they are being "forced" to list on CL, because as much as you hate the UX, UI, etc., that's where the buyers are. And as much as the buyers hate the site, that's where the sellers are. I hate CL, but I was forced to use it because lock-in makes it impossible for anyone else to compete.
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
That's disingenuous. Craigslist is pretty much the only game in town in many places. Let's say you need to find a person with a specific need, willing to pay $2000 a month. If you don't find this person, you have to pay the $2000 a month. How do you feel about not using Craigslist now?
[+] [-] darma1|13 years ago|reply
What people really "need" is the raw data.
If they want to make some UI that they like, then they can do it. If they want to offer this to others, they can do it.
If they want to load the data into some SQL database, they can do it.
If they want split the data into some other format using csplit and load into some other faster database, they can do it.
If they want to extract a portion of a raw file and just use agrep on that, they can do it.
The point is that UI is a personal decision.
Because some people do not like CL's bare bones UI doesn't give them the right to do anything. Because some people don't like bloated and clumsy web interfaces and prefer text commands doesn't give them the right to do anything either.
But people can't be stopped from making personal decisions about how to process data. Public data.
It's funny how some websites think they "own" data that is given to them. Do they "need" this data? Yes, they do.
[+] [-] res0nat0r|13 years ago|reply
"The company said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."
[+] [-] mootothemax|13 years ago|reply
It's a shame for the guy behind Padmapper, but hopefully there'll be a lesson learnt about knowing which fights are worth picking versus knowing when to move on.
Somehow Google managed to overcome Yahoo and Altavista without scraping their data. And look at something like GumTree in the UK, which has always been miles ahead of Craigslist - no first mover advantage taken up there. Plus, GumTree's design has been equally woeful over the years.
[+] [-] dap|13 years ago|reply
I don't know who's legally right, but I've got no sympathy for Craigslist. They've got a monopoly on the data (whether right or wrong) and refuse to either build a decent UI for consumers or let other people do so.
That sounds bad, but I think you can't know how infuriating it really is until you've tried to find housing in a town where CL is the only real option and where demand far exceeds supply (where you spend many, many hours on the effort because of intense demand-side competition).
[+] [-] _sentient|13 years ago|reply
Yahoo search would be a hell of a lot better if they could just scrape results from Google, but thankfully they lack the misguided sense of entitlement that Padmapper seems to suffer from.
[+] [-] debacle|13 years ago|reply
No, it really doesn't. This isn't going to be a long, exciting case challenging the underpinnings of copyright law and server terms of services. Padmapper isn't that company.
[+] [-] blhack|13 years ago|reply
Eric, everybody saw this coming.
[+] [-] nostromo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfosco|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrodust|13 years ago|reply
Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it. The alternatives somehow manage to be even more spectacularly useless by over-designing their apps and cluttering them up with junk.
Padmapper is one of the few that does what they're supposed to do, and it's not even an optimal implementation of this sort of thing.
[+] [-] ori_b|13 years ago|reply
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.
[+] [-] flatline3|13 years ago|reply
Padmapper is (indirectly) screen-scraping Craigslist's data in an attempt to unseat Craigslist.
[+] [-] jblock|13 years ago|reply
If a lot of people INSIST on using it, then that means it has good UX. Complaints with their UX should be qualified.
[+] [-] pat2man|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
Please use the proper legal word - "Monopoly". I wonder how the Department of Justice decides who to prosecute?
[+] [-] keeptrying|13 years ago|reply
Padmapper is the best apartment rental interface out there. The author has been single handedly working on this for 3-4 years and constantly improving his system.
Legally he might not have been in the right but we should be helping him out not uselessly debating and casting judgement.
If theres anyone who exmplifies the true spirit of Hacker News it would be the author of PadMapper.
[+] [-] greyboy|13 years ago|reply
If he's not "legally not in the right," why should I be helping him (doesn't that imply casting a judgement - that PadMapper is elevated above CraigsList because it's "the best apartment rental interface our there")?
What if the tables were turned and CraigsList was violating PadMapper's TOS? Would you be willing to help CraigsList (they serve more than only apartment listings)?
Should somebody be rewarded, even if (legally) not in the right, just because he/she is a hard worker/smarty pants/exemplifies the True Hacker Spirit?
I often wonder if there is some sort of unwritten clause that You-Must-Pull-For-The-Underdog to join Hacker News? (In the name of Divine Disruption, of course.)
[+] [-] bugsbunnyak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aggronn|13 years ago|reply
In particular, read the comments by Craig himself. Funny how these things change.
[+] [-] webwright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
Are there any Craigslist employees reading this? Would any of you like a full time job sorting through the cesspool that is your apartment listings page? Oh, you wouldn't? I don't blame you, because that's my job right now, and PadMapper is the only thing helping me preserve what's left of my sanity.
Do a better job than them or shut the fuck up. Stop hurting people by trying to shut PadMapper down.