On the 3Taps and PadMapper legal battle with Craigslist
Who owns the kind of information collected by Craigslist? The classifieds site has staked its claim in a series of lawsuits against apartment listings mapper PadMapper and Craigslist data scraper 3taps. On Monday, 3taps will file a bold counterclaim, aiming for a victory that would bring a new era of pubilc information.
ReadWriteWeb has learned that 3taps plans to file an answer to Craigslist's lawsuit on Monday, September 24, denying many of Craigslist's claims. Alongside this response, 3taps will file an antitrust countersuit, alleging that Craigslist maintains a monopolistic control over numerous markets related to online classified advertising. If successful, 3taps could open up the market to numerous innovations atop Craigslist data and bring about the user interface and search features, whose lacking seem to be exemplified by the popularity of sites such as PadMapper and others who have fallen to Craigslist litigation.
This is complete nonsense. Claiming Craigslist has a monopoly position is just reaching. People are free to post in other venues. For example, selling stuff online has many other outlets, Etsy, Ebay, to name a few. Apartments are listed on apartments.com, rent.com among hundreds of other local and national sites. There's no monopoly position at play because no one has to use CL. There are alternatives and CL doesn't prevent anyone from using those alternatives.
If the PadMapper and 3taps guys wanted to disrupt online classifieds, they'd do it. Their entire model is based out of sheer laziness.
If PadMapper wanted to disrupt apartment listings, they'd build a great product (which they possibly have,) then they'd market that product and convince people to use it. Facebook didn't get big by scraping Myspace profiles: they employed a geographically-restricted (actually academically restricted) approach and slowly opened the floodgates. The Pad and 3taps guys simple want to piggyback on Craigslist's success and hard work. It isn't like Craigslist is stopping anyone from creating their own sites. It took Craigslist 20 years to get where they are.. what right does anyone have to just steal their listings, especially since the terms of use for the site and data contained therein is explicitly spelled out: you can't use anything on Craigslist without approval of Craigslist. Nothing is stopping the sellers from posting in other venues.
I must have missed class the day they talked about how you can repackage someone else's content and sell it without compensating the original publisher. Claiming that apartment listings are "facts" and thus not copyrightable is a weak claim. While it might be a "fact" that someone is offering an apartment for rent -- the description of that listing could vary based on the venue through which that apartment is offered. If an apartment has the word "spacious" in the listing, that is not a fact, that's an opinion. Publications International v. Meredith Corporation (1996), for example, established that a recipe isn't copyrightable, however the words used to describe it are. A recipe happens to be a process, which can be patented however, although the CL situation isn't about process. Logically, a house being for rent isn't copyrightable, but the words describing it are.
So unless PadMapper wants to rewrite each listing they post, they are clearly on very weak legal ground. The Feist v. Rural decision is irrelevant because a CL listing is not a collection of facts arranged alphabetically, but it is an interpretation of the facts by the seller. For example, "Spacious 3 bedroom apartment for rent in a nice area." To attain "fact" status under the Feist v. Rural standard, the listing could only be 3-bedroom apartment, 145 Main Street, $450/month. However, very few, if any CL listings resemble that fact-only presentation. 'Spacious' and 'in a nice area' are judgements/opinions, not encyclopedic facts. Spacious to me in the New York City area means something different than spacious in Montana. 'Nice area' to me means sidewalks without drug paraphernalia littering the sidewalk, while for someone in Chicago it might mean gangstas using weapons with a lower rate of fire. The Feist decision dealt with objective, indisputable facts -- a person's name and a person's phone number. Craigslist listings are far more nuanced.
Another thing is that perhaps the content providers (the sellers) don't want their listings propagated on other sites.
This has happened to me: list an item for sale on CL, someone reposts the ad without my permission on their classified site, I sell the item from someone responding to the CL ad, then for the next several weeks (after I've removed the ad from CL,) I'm still getting tons of emails from interested buyers for a product that isn't available. It wastes my time and it wastes the buyer's time. Occasionally, I've included a phone number and continued to get calls from visitors to other sites reposting my ad long after the ad was removed.
If I wanted my listing cross-posted, I would have cross-posted it. I don't need PadMapper or 3taps deciding in what venues I should be listing my ads. I never entered any agreement with those gents and never gave them permission to broadcast my data to their users.
The 3taps guys seem to think that indexing by Google entitles them to free usage of the information. They need to RTFM (Read the F'ing Manual.)
Padmapper/3taps et al need to understand that
To disrupt an industry it takes hard work. Very hard work, not simply repackaging other people's stuff.
Content indexed or submitted to Google is not licensed for use by other third parties.
From Google's Terms of Service:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
I have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs that try to disrupt, create revolutions, push evolutions or otherwise try to improve things. However, I don't have any respect for crybabies that try to pull a David vs. Goliath routine simply because they aren't creative or dedicated enough to build their own empire. The Apple vs. Samsung case wasn't about stopping innovation, it was about forcing people to actually innovate, create something original, push the human race forward instead of just piggybacking on whatever the industry leader is doing. Remember, when iPhone first came out, they had almost no marketshare. They earned their success, while companies like Samsung, and now 3taps and PadMapper would prefer to just leech upon others rather than creating their own innovative thing.
If PadMapper wanted to disrupt Craigslist in the apartment space, they could do it. They need to hyper-target a specific neighborhood. Call landlords' ads and tell them, "Hey, we'll post your property on our site for free, if you give us permission." Then they post paper flyers all over the neighborhood. If their product is really that awesome, they'll get people within that neighborhood to love their site. Soon, PadMapper would be known as the "best place to find an apartment in Williamsburg (or wherever)." Then PadMapper would add another neighborhood, repeating the process until soon they own a city. Then expand to other cities.
But hell, that takes actual work. You know, the kind of work that involves shoe leather and sweating as opposed to simply coding all day.
How bad do you want to win?
