Craigslist Terms of Use Continue to Overreach

[Commentary] In July, Craigslist sued 3Taps, a company that took Craigslist listings and made them accessible to third-party developers to make useful add-ons (like Padmapper, a site that plotted apartment listings on maps). Craigslist threw a bevy of complaints at these companies, including that they infringed Craigslist's copyrights in the listings—an odd claim, since most of those bare-bones listings aren't copyrightable in the first place, and because any copyrights would belong to the authors of the posts, and not Craigslist. Now 3Taps has filed a countersuit, alleging that Craigslist is violating antitrust laws. This fresh batch of press got me to take a look at Craigslist's terms of use again, and I found something odd—Craigslist appears to be trying to leverage its terms of use into potential copyright lawsuits.