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Craigslist Drops Exclusive License To Your Posts
First time accepted submitter Penurious Penguin writes "Last week Craigslist demanded exclusive license to the content you post there, an odd demand which would have prevented ad-content on Craigslist from being advertised anywhere else but Craigslist. Thankfully, today we read from the EFF, the Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts. From the article: 'For many years, craigslist has been a good digital citizen. Its opposition to SOPA/PIPA was critically important, and it has been at the forefront of challenges to Section 230 and freedom of expression online. We understand that craigslist faces real challenges in trying to preserve its character and does not want third parties to simply reuse its content in ways that are out of line with its user community’s expectations and could be harmful to its users.
Nevertheless, it was important for craigslist to remove the provision because claiming an exclusive license to the user’s posts--to the exclusion of everyone, including the original poster--would have harmed both innovation and users’ rights, and would have set a terrible precedent. We met with craigslist to discuss this recently and are pleased about their prompt action.'"
There's really no way they could have enforced it anyway because it would have fallen in the lowest court, and indeed the ones that followed had they wished to appeal it.
Simply non-news. They screwed up, and caught it.
But other web sites may *try* to continue with this kind of bull shit. Again, it would never ever pass legal muster in a court, it's just asking for a huge class action (where no one wins except the lawyers)...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You have no right!
Then all the post's selling dope and hookers could then turn around and say it wasn't theirs, that craigslist owned it. Then we can see how well their little ass headed ideas work for them, instead of having to scold them (and every other dumbshit company) like children.
The best way to solve the "problem" of other people using their data, is to fix their own search tools. Hell, just being able to search all locations within 100 miles would be nice. All these other websites pop up because there own presentation is so bad.
I am no lawyer (would appreciate it a lawyer to comment on this) but it seems obvious that CraigsList would be liable for user content if they claimed they owned it. People have been raped, murdered, robbed, and had identity stolen, from that website. I cringe when I apply for jobs using it as I know bad guys use it as well but I have to work right?
If I were a lawyer for these victims I would be drooling at the fact that CL claims they own that post and all its content in that scam!
http://saveie6.com/
No matter how much you pay lawyers to pretend it's true, boilerplate legalese can't remove your implicit copyright to your own works.
But the copyright and patent systems in the US are so messed up that most people think it's ok.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As I understand your post, you're claiming a difference between the liability of an owner and the liability of an exclusive licensee who effectively exercises the powers of an owner. What's the statute or case law citation for this difference?
Would it be practical to make an add-on to Firefox which opens (selected site whose URLs must be typed in during setup by the user!)
then displays aggregated content?
That would beat opening a tab for each local then punching in search term and category.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
now all my good troll comments are going to be copied and plastered all over the internets
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If CL wanted to be good digital citizens, they'd allow web developers to improve upon their crappy marketplace. Their apartment rentals and car sales are especially crap. Really, how hard would it be to add some criteria to a car sales ad so the buyer could search by brand, model, mileage.. Any time someone does a good thing and tries to add value to their crappy system (adding a google map interface and javascript sorting) to listings, Craig shuts em down. The site hasn't changed in 10 years and is overrun by spammers and scammers. Dude needs to get off his lazy ass, charge a few bucks for listings, and hire some decent talent to do justice to his product and market share.
As the Internet makes information easier to deliver, the traditional publishers struggle to deal with the separation of content and distribution. This transition is still unsettled because the shift from delivery to filtering is not complete. Someday, we will be able to access almost all data, and the trick will be to find the relevant information. There will be a lot of money made by successfully editing the world's knowledge. Until that model evolves, we are stuck with problems such as this.
It is wiser to know only what you need to know when you need to know it than to try to know everything.
I wonder how this affects the rights of other sites that feed of Craig's List. They probably did this because of other sites that map listings or otherwise re-display the posts.
Craigslist could only wish that people who use their site use it because they want Craig Newmark to exclusively own the rights to their postings... People don't use craigslist because they want craigslist to own the content, they do it to sell something. If it isn't craigslist, it is one of the other 500 sites that do the same thing. I think most people who stop using that site if they thought for one second that what they are submitting is not under their control.
Somehow, In My opinion, this exclusive license is really damn superb for filtering much more responsible contents that we would post there, but...would that be also very supportive as it is meant to be expressive to any ideas and talks? ...I don't think people can easily devote their own thoughts if they already know that the limitations on same cases of writing will be beyond their reasonable minds.....Agree BUT Dislike...????? hhhmmmm....then let me just write on my own website Furniture Jepara...and I WOULD REALLY FEEL FREE.....cheerrsss.....
I understand that EFF is filled with self-righteous nerds whose purpose it is to police Nerd Dogma like a priesthood, but what if I only wanted to share my post with the community where I posted it? What if I don't want my ad read outside of my city? CL was protecting their community. WE FUCKING KNOW HOW TO POST TO FACEBOOK OR GOOGLE IF WE WANT THAT. Can't a community setup a bulletin board without being fucking raped by advertisers who are being enabled by self-righteous nerds?
It is typical Nerd Blindness: Nerd Solutions for everyone, even though that is not what everyone wants. Also, US-centric baby political thinking about how the rights of a fucking advertiser are being infringed.
EFF can have the best intentions in the world and they will still do wrong half the time because they are an insular little homogenous group of nerds with no idea about how the world really works outside a computer and no humility, so they don't even recognize that.
Start your own community and invite people to post if you want the posts shared broadly. For years, we are posting to CL expecting it to be published only on CL. Sorry, nerds, if that fucks up your $100,000 per year job coding for an advertiser, you fucking hypocrites.
For what it's worth, Craigslist really is a marvel of the modern age. We rarely see something so useful to so many people with so little bullshit in this day and age.