<story><title>Craigslist&apos;s Allegations Of &quot;Copyright&quot; Violations Thrown Out</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/04/30/craigslists-allegations-of-copyright-violations-thrown-out/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>This is actually not a great decision so far.
I skimmed the decision from PACER (so the below may be wrong or missing facts), and it looks like (and remember, this is just a preliminary decision by the court) that the court found&lt;p&gt;1. The individual posts were copyrightable&lt;p&gt;2. The compilation (whose only creativity is being organized by geographic area), was copyrightable (because &quot;“deciding which categories to include and under what name,”&quot; met the minimal level of creativity necessary for copyright)&lt;p&gt;3. Craigslist&apos;s eventually lost the copyright claims because the TOU was not an exclusive license (in the US, only an exclusive rights owner can sue for infringement, licensesees cannot)&lt;p&gt;4. Craigslist did not need to register the actual posts it&apos;s suing over, only the compilation&lt;p&gt;#1 is maybe right (i think it depends on the post)&lt;p&gt;#2 should be clearly wrong, though there is a bit of bad precedent here&lt;p&gt;#3 is good, but the judge basically suggested with the right set of words buried in the terms of use, craigslist could have transferred copyright.  This is actually really dangerous in practice (you want people to know exactly what they are getting into), because you really want copyright transfers to be clear and knowing by users, and buried somewhere in a separate TOU document, plus a button says &quot;by clicking you accept the TOU&quot;, shouldn&apos;t be enough.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just a preliminary decision based on minimal briefing, so i&apos;m hopeful the judge would have gotten it &quot;righter&quot; had those claims not been dismissed.&lt;p&gt;#4 is probably wrong, in the sense that registering &quot;craigslist.org&quot; as a compilation, should not count as registering &lt;i&gt;all the works that have ever appeared on craigslist.org&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;At best, it should be registering the works that appeared as of the copyright registration date for craigslist.org.&lt;p&gt;The compilation registered in 2012 is titled &quot;Craigslist website 2012 (Homepage and primary supporting pages)&quot;&lt;p&gt;That should not be &quot;all posts&quot;.
There are also two compilation registrations for post.craigslist.org, one in 2004, one in 2008.&lt;p&gt;None of these should be sufficient to claim what they did.</text></comment>
<story><title>Craigslist&apos;s Allegations Of &quot;Copyright&quot; Violations Thrown Out</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/04/30/craigslists-allegations-of-copyright-violations-thrown-out/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ultimoo</author><text>&quot;Craiglist has been recognized for a failure to innovate and having among the internet’s worst terms of service’s.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Wow, that is quite a way to open an article! Isn&apos;t journalism supposed to be slightly more neutral than that. I understand that most of us (myself included) are quite against copyrighting, DRM and closed source etc. but let&apos;s not harshly rebuke a company with 30 employees [1]. Simply put, copyright is a contract between the society and an individual that encourages the individual to create, innovate and be artistic. Craigslist did things that they thought were right to protect their users&apos; and their own interests. They found a market. Padmapper used their data. Courts said it is ok to do so since they didn&apos;t the copyright to begin with. Fine, let&apos;s move on.&lt;p&gt;No reason to write such a bitter sounding article peppered with &quot;Let this be a lesson to all tech companies&quot;, &quot;hopefully this will discourage craigslist&quot;, and &quot;sledgehammer to scare innovators&quot;. tsk. tsk. Forbes.</text></comment>