If they were honestly all about helping people solve their problems, would they really care if it was them providing the solution, someone else building upon their data, or someone else cutting them out of the action?
If they were honestly all about helping people, surely Craigslist would let the market decide what is most helpful to them.
They are letting the market decide.. They just aren't letting people use their content. Craig is a bit of a nut, but it is a business. People are free to use other sites an post ads on other sites. CL isn't stopping them. Even the smallest indie record label would sue if another record company released an album with that label's songs. They may be in it 'for the music' but they aren't going to cut off their own foot or let people shoplift the product, even if the recording quality is bad and the packaging ugly.
It wasn't really their content. And now, though they are claiming exclusivity, it's not really in the interest of their beloved users to claim it as theirs.
And no, people don't appear to be legally free to use other sites as well as Craigslist with the same content they've created.
No, but the content is hosted on their servers. Services scraping this content will hit CL's infrastructure hard. It's actually in the interest of their users to minimize server load, so they can browse listings more quickly.
And no, people don't appear to be legally free to use other sites as well as Craigslist with the same content they've created.
If you're not a lawyer, this is conjecture. We don't know how this will be enforced in the future.
If they were honestly all about helping people, surely Craigslist would let the market decide what is most helpful to them.