See Section 5 of the Craigslist TOS [1]. Then see sections 11 and 12, which link to their liquidated damages policy [2].
I would imagine that Craigslist's future arguments would now hinge on the fact that people must access their servers in a way that they have defined, via their TOS, to be unauthorized.
From the liquidated damages document: "each day that CL's servers are accessed to facilitate one or more of the violations enumerated therein shall constitute one Instance of Unauthorized Conduct" And, in particular, Section 6 of that document: "you agree to pay $25,000 per Instance of Unauthorized Conduct: (a) copying, aggregation, display, distribution or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist (including, but not limited to, by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes, or RSS feeds)" ... (etc)
What is the enforceability of a TOS that you aren't forced to see? It seems silly to make this a legally enforceable contract when you didn't even so much as click through it, or checked a box that says you clicked through it.
When it's possible to, in good faith, use a website without once seeing its TOS, how can it be legally enforceable?
Also, what's the enforceability of a TOS that disallows actions that would otherwise be legal?
There are 4 standard forms of IP protection that would prevent people from using your work: copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. The data on Craigslist isn't protected by any of these, so are they still able to make it illegal to use that data just because they said so?
See Section 5 of the Craigslist TOS [1]. Then see sections 11 and 12, which link to their liquidated damages policy [2].
I would imagine that Craigslist's future arguments would now hinge on the fact that people must access their servers in a way that they have defined, via their TOS, to be unauthorized.
From the liquidated damages document: "each day that CL's servers are accessed to facilitate one or more of the violations enumerated therein shall constitute one Instance of Unauthorized Conduct" And, in particular, Section 6 of that document: "you agree to pay $25,000 per Instance of Unauthorized Conduct: (a) copying, aggregation, display, distribution or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist (including, but not limited to, by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes, or RSS feeds)" ... (etc)
1 = http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use
2 = http://www.craigslist.org/about/liquidated.damages