You'd need to show that CL copied ads from newspapers in order to attract traffic, and I don't believe that's the case. taking away market share and scraping someone's website for content are vastly different things.
But when giving away an exclusive license, as CL requires, you aren't allowed to run the same content in both the newspaper and CL, right?
I have always wondered about running a similar listing somewhere else first, then running something lightly edited on Craigslist, sending their registered agent, by registered mail, a note that the exclusive license applies only to the relatively minor editorial changes applied.... I wonder how fast such would get delisted....
Do you think most people listing ads on CL read the terms and understand them as you did? (Or were the terms confusing?) Are CL's terms different from what one would normally expect from a newspaper? That is, would you expect that the newspaper would require an exclusive license and prohibit you from running your ad anywhere else?
Yes, they are. Normally if someone wants an exclusive right to content they pay the producer for them. Virtually everyone else asks for a non-exclusive license. This is very different and has been discussed here on HN before.
And didn't CL change their terms (excl-->nonexcl) after some blogger posted about them? And didn't they make some changes to their site (collaborate with a maps provider so users can now get geo mappings) after filing this lawsuit? I've already forgotten now. This case just seems laughable to me. But what do I know.
"stole" market share. You got it. "[S]tole" was just a figure of speech. And that is in fact what meant by stole.
re: scraping. This is something that has come before the courts a few times (I'm thinking Ebay and a few others; although it might have been called "crawling"). Do you think CL can win on a claim of "scraping"?
