Craigslist Demands Exclusivity For Postings

Bill Dimm writes "Craigslist now demands an exclusive license to the content you post there. How many people are aware that they are agreeing not to post their job ads, rentals, items for sale, etc. anywhere else when they post to Craigslist?" It's not going out on much a limb to suspect this is to strengthen Craigslist's position against those extension sites they love so much.

Comments

That's not what it says

[Anonymous Coward]

They are claiming exclusivity to the content not intent. Change your verbiage when you post to eBay and you're good.

Craigslist is a shithole

[SuperBanana]

As someone currently trying to find a place to live - craigslist is a shithole. Everything except the by-owner apartment section is just horrible, with realtors keyword spamming and posting the same ads multiple times a day; nobody flags them. Age/gender/orientation/class discrimination is rampant and uncontrolled (in my particular neighborhood, you have to be late-20's, GLBT or female, and a grad student, or nobody wants to live with you or have you as a tenant.) It's also firmly stuck around 1996 technology. The searching sucks. The new photo gallery sucks (makes printing or PDF-saving an ad difficult.) They still don't do any kind of validation on the address fields, which makes apartment/room hunting a nightmare because people can't seem to handle "enter nearest cross-streets" 50% of the time. Up until recently they were profiteering off the sex industry (which uses human trafficking) and fought bitterly when the state attorneys went after them for it. About the only two things CL has going for it: pages are served reasonably fast, and the site doesn't go down very often. Really, guys: there's a REASON WHY sites like Padmapper and others exist...

Another one down

[JohnFen]

That's insane. I've used Craigslist quite a lot for various things, but I'm not about to give them (or anyone else who hasn't hired me to produce something for them) exclusive rights to anything whatsoever.

So, I guess Craigslist effectively no longer exists for me. I'm not angry or upset with CL about this, merely disappointed that they've made their TOS so unacceptable to me that I can't use them. I can't wait for the service that comes to replace it!

I don't think this is legally valid

[TheSpoom]

Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent.

Is this legally enough for Craigslist? Wouldn't they need a full copyright assignment in order to pursue copyright infringement claims?

I bet if questioned in court, such a claim would be thrown out due to lack of standing, since copyright ownership would belong to the writer of the post, not with Craigslist. After all, that was the reasoning that killed Righthaven when they tried to make a similar deal with their newspaper clients.