Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Craigslist Sues PadMapper; Founder Says He Tried to Negotiate

Craiglist, which is surprisingly litigious considering its hippie mentality, has sued PadMapper and data scraper 3taps, which had provided an alternative and more modern map-based display that included the site’s listings.

The lawsuit was filed July 20 in federal court in San Francisco, and was first reported by GigaOM.

Though PadMapper developer Eric DeMenthon had taken more of a damn-the-torpedoes approach a few weeks ago, having found 3taps as a data supply workaround after Craigslist sent him a cease-and-desist letter, today he was more circumspect.

“I wish we had just been able to talk and reach a reasonable solution, but they weren’t willing to talk with me about it. I would have been willing to do quite a bit, including shutting down whatever they thought was competitive about the site,” he said.

Craigslist is accusing PadMapper and 3taps of copyright and trademark infringement, breach of contract and unfair competition. In addition to displaying Craigslist content, PadMapper allows aggregating, favoriting and saving posts and searches, all things Craigslist does not allow.

Craigslist does allow third-party companies to license its data for use on mobile devices, which it says it offered to PadMapper. DeMenthon said today that this wasn’t applicable because PadMapper is mostly Web-based.

Craigslist and 3taps did not reply to requests for comment.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google