Craigslist posts to be “exclusive,” users cannot republish

If you’re going to list an item on Craigslist, you better not advertise it anywhere else. In an effort to suffocate competing sites, the online classifieds website says your listings are now exclusive to Craigslist, barred from re-posting.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":501153,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"C"}']

Tech startup founder Jon Berger first noticed the new agreement today. It reads:

“Clicking ‘continue’ confirms that Craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing, or preparing derivative works without its consent.”

This will obviously anger users who want to spread their listings as far and wide as possible in order to get more attention for their items.

The “exclusive” license stems out of an ongoing issue Craigslist is having with apartment listing website PadMapper. PadMapper, created by Eric DeMenthon, is a one-man operation that takes apartment listings and lays them over a Google Map. You can search by type of space (room for rent, sublet, or for-rent apartment), number of bedrooms or bathrooms, and price of rent. PadMapper originally was accessing Craigslist’s servers to grab listing from the website, but Craigslist blocked the site’s access in June.

PadMapper turned around and found a way to continue using Craigslist posts without access Craigslist’s servers, using an application programming interface (API) supplied by 3taps. DeMenthon said in a blog post that he felt bad going against Craigslist’s wishes but decided that, since PadMapper could save people time and energy in the apartment-search process, including Craigslist postings was for the greater good.

Craigslist is currently in the process of suing both PadMapper and 3taps for copyright infringement.

via Jon Berger, hat tip TechCrunch