Greetings To All! Ever Heard Of Craigslist?

[Ms_Lamborghini]

Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year!!

I'm back again with one more silly question before this year is over..

I know most of us have heard about Craigslist, but what I was not aware of until today was that there are sites online linked to Craigslist promoting all the posts from Craigslist on their OWN sites..
Can someone help me understand how these people are doing this? (implementing all of Craiglist posts on their sites).

Is CL aware of this?
I would love to be able to do this same thing as well if is legal.

Here's one of the sites I'm talking about to give you a very good live example of what I mean...

http://www.apartmentsandrenters.com/

I would love to have a site just like that with my own domain promoting all of Craigslist's posts as well..
Who can tell me how this would be done or is it even legal?

Thanks,
ML

[the_ancient]

Most sections of Criags list are avaliable in RSS so it would be a simple matter of Grabbing the RSS feed and reusing it however

12. ACCESS TO THE SERVICE

craigslist grants you a limited, revocable, nonexclusive license to access
the Service for your own personal use. This license does not include:
(a) access to the Service by Posting Agents; or (b) any collection,
aggregation, copying, duplication, display or derivative use of the Service
nor any use of data mining, robots, spiders, or similar data gathering and
extraction tools for any purpose unless expressly permitted by craigslist.
A limited exception to (b) is provided to general purpose internet search
engines and non-commercial public archives that use such tools to gather
information for the sole purpose of displaying hyperlinks to the Service,
provided they each do so from a stable IP address or range of IP addresses
using an easily identifiable agent and comply with our robots.txt file.
"General purpose internet search engine" does not include a website or
search engine or other service that specializes in classified listings
or in any subset of classifieds listings such as jobs, housing, for sale,
services, or personals, or which is in the business of providing classified
ad listing services.

craigslist permits you to display on your website, or create a hyperlink
on your website to, individual postings on the Service so long as such use
is for noncommercial and/or news reporting purposes only (e.g., for use in
personal web blogs or personal online media). If the total number of such
postings displayed or linked to on your website exceeds one hundred (100)
postings, your use will be presumed to be in violation of the TOU,
absent express permission granted by craigslist to do so. You may also
create a hyperlink to the home page of craigslist sites so long as the
link does not portray craigslist, its employees, or its affiliates in a
false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise offensive matter.

craigslist offers various parts of the Service in RSS format so that users
can embed individual feeds into a personal website or blog, or view postings
through third party software news aggregators. craigslist permits you to
display, excerpt from, and link to the RSS feeds on your personal website
or personal web blog, provided that (a) your use of the RSS feed is for
personal, non-commercial purposes only, (b) each title is correctly linked
back to the original post on the Service and redirects the user to the
post when the user clicks on it, (c) you provide, adjacent to the RSS
feed, proper attribution to 'craigslist' as the source, (d) your use or
display does not suggest that craigslist promotes or endorses any third
party causes, ideas, web sites, products or services, (e) you do not
redistribute the RSS feed, and (f) your use does not overburden
craigslist's systems. craigslist reserves all rights in the content of
the RSS feeds and may terminate any RSS feed at any time.

Use of the Service beyond the scope of authorized access granted to you by
craigslist immediately terminates said permission or license. In order to
collect, aggregate, copy, duplicate, display or make derivative use of the
the Service or any Content made available via the Service for other
purposes (including commercial purposes) not stated herein, you must first
obtain a license from craigslist.

So from that, what your wanting to do would violate Criags list Terms of Use.

Keep in mind that just because these web sites are out their, does not mean they are preforming with in the Terms of Use, most of them are Leechs and should be shot.

[owens]

I'm wondering if you could get around this somehow. What if you have 100 for each of your subdomains and you have 10 subdomains so that's actually 1000 posts. Is that still okay? Furthermore what does non-comercial and private personal website mean? Most websites are available for the public. If you are getting ad revenue is that when you cross the line into being commercial? What if I choose to make my personal site look just like a classifieds page? That's my own personal choice right? I'm pretty sure you could get away with a lot because this is so vague but I'm not a lawyer.

[Vin DSL]

What if you have 100 for each of your subdomains and you have 10 subdomains so that's actually 1000 posts. Is that still okay?

Explain, please!

[Frank Broughton]

If you are placing that many ads forget it. That would be spamming and spammers are scumbuckets. You do not want to be considered that eh?

[owens]

Clarification of my earlier post:

I'm referring to the terms of use section of Craigslist. I created a simple php script that uses an already existing RSS parser and an already existing classifieds script. My script connects to an rss feed such as http://seattle.craigslist.org/zip/index.rss and parses the data and then stores it into the database for the classified script. I put in safe guards to prevent it from storing over the maximum posts you can show
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If the total number of such postings displayed or linked to on your website exceeds one hundred (100) postings, your use will be presumed to be in violation of the TOU, absent express permission granted by craigslist to do so. - Craigslist
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When the RSS posts are displayed on my site I generate the following disclaimer:
"This post is provided as part of an RSS feed from www.craigslist.org which is available freely for non-commercial use."

Below that there is a link back to the original post on craigslist.

No email addresses are stored and no spam is sent. This is not about spam.
I don't even store the images from craiglist or links to them. It's just the title, description, and link back to the original post that I store.
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There are three questions I have though:

1) If you can only have 100 posts displayed on your website (the typical number in one RSS feed) then does that mean the whole website or would that mean each subdomain could have 100 posts on it? I guess that gets into the question of what constitutes a website. I don't see the difference between having one website with a bunch of subdomains and having multiple websites that each have a domain.

2) The question of what is non-commercial use. If let's say my site is not getting any revenue from showing the RSS posts and my site does not charge users to make their own posts it is non-commercial in that sense. However, I want to show some Google AdSense ads on some pages so that may be commercial. What if I don't show google AdSense ads when users see the RSS posts? Then there is no way Craiglist could claim I am getting revenue from their posts.

3) Craigslist says: "...craigslist permits you to
display, excerpt from, and link to the RSS feeds on your personal website
or personal web blog..." What if my personal website just happens to have some nice features like an area for users to post classifieds? That's my personal choice perhaps isn't it? I guess it gets into what is a personal website and yet I'm still not clear on what constitutes a website. These terms should be defined better in the Terms of Use.

Am I missing something here? Am I just asking for a lawsuit from craigslist? Let me know what you think.

[JonathanB]

Since all of your questions basically boil down to how the owners of Criagslist interpret them, you might want to consider contacting them. Any answer you get from someone on these boards (especially if they are not an attorney) isn't going to help you if Craigslist files a lawsuit.