Padmapper alone isn't the existential threat. But other well-funded competitors using the same arguments/techniques to offer 'all Craiglist ads, and then more' could be. Hence Craiglist's assertiveness before the principle of reuse is established.
CL has every right to do that, especially since scraping CL listings creates a very high amount of load on their servers. Higher load --> slower response time --> deteriorated user experience.
Did I say they don't have the legal right to do that? No, I didn't. I doubt anybody did.
There's no particular reason to think that spiders are a giant problem for them. Any high-volume site deals with crawlers all the time. If it were a problem because of some site architecture weirdness, it'd be easy enough to set up something that wouldn't be problematic. For example, the RSS feeds they already offer.
Worst case, they could charge people like Padmapper a fee to license the data. Which in fact they already do, but they insist on it being mobile only.
So Craigslist's behavior is purely a business choice, not driven by any technical necessity.
Their argument was at one stage that they can keep most of the site free by keeping their costs way down by having a simple site. The though free & simple was better than fancier for a price or even that the simplicity was good in itself.
For a long time that argument was interesting and seemed to be working. Now it seems to be not working as well.
It may be that technology & UI brought to the table in 2002 would have been a net loss for Craigslist & that in 2007 improvements would have been too small to bother with. In 2012 there is mounting proof that tech & UI have improved enough that the potential improvements are huge.
When the gap between what a big provider is doing and what is possible gets that big, that's economic pressure. It will be felt in all sorts of ways: competition, users trying to access the data via different interfaces, etc.
Tightening up TCs or setting legal precedents is plugging leaks that happened because of the pressure. Not only does plugging leaks not relieve pressure, it increases it.
If they were honestly all about helping people solve their problems, would they really care if it was them providing the solution, someone else building upon their data, or someone else cutting them out of the action?
If they were honestly all about helping people, surely Craigslist would let the market decide what is most helpful to them.
They are letting the market decide.. They just aren't letting people use their content. Craig is a bit of a nut, but it is a business. People are free to use other sites an post ads on other sites. CL isn't stopping them. Even the smallest indie record label would sue if another record company released an album with that label's songs. They may be in it 'for the music' but they aren't going to cut off their own foot or let people shoplift the product, even if the recording quality is bad and the packaging ugly.
It wasn't really their content. And now, though they are claiming exclusivity, it's not really in the interest of their beloved users to claim it as theirs.
And no, people don't appear to be legally free to use other sites as well as Craigslist with the same content they've created.
No, but the content is hosted on their servers. Services scraping this content will hit CL's infrastructure hard. It's actually in the interest of their users to minimize server load, so they can browse listings more quickly.
And no, people don't appear to be legally free to use other sites as well as Craigslist with the same content they've created.
If you're not a lawyer, this is conjecture. We don't know how this will be enforced in the future.
