In a ruling handed down Monday in San Francisco, US District Judge Charles Breyer refused the request of PadMapper, 3 Taps and other defendants to throw out a laundry list of claims by Craigslist, which is accusing the defendants of hacking, copyright infringement and more.

In the view of Craigslist, the newer companies are plundering data which it has collected and compiled at great effort. The defendants, meanwhile, say Craigslist is monopolizing data that belongs to users while offering an ugly, out-dated service. The lawsuit broke out last summer.

In a key part of Tuesday’s highly-technical decision, the judge examined whether Craigslist’s terms of service meant that users had given the site permission to use their ads as the basis for copyright lawsuits. The judge said Craigslist didn’t obtain such permission, except for a short period in the summer of 2012 when the site changed its terms of service — before backing down in the face of a popular backlash.

What this means is that Craigslist can rely on users’ ads to go forward with its copyright lawsuit, but only those ads written between July 16 and August 8, 2012. The judge also said said that Craigslist may have its own copyright over the way it has compiled the ads, though it will still have to prove that this compilation is an “original” artistic work.

The hacking portion of the decision, which is based on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a similar law in California, is also nuanced. The judge wrote that the companies’ attempts to access Craigslist data after receiving cease-and-desist letters might be “unauthorized access” under the laws, but implicitly suggested that the laws are out of date.

The judge also gave Craigslist a minor victory by agreeing to shelve counter-claims from Padmapper and 3Taps over the monopoly issue. The defendants won their own minor victory when the judge threw out Craigslist’s conspiracy claims.

So what does all this mean? Monday’s decision is very preliminary and was about what can stay in the case — the real action will start at the summary judgment stage, likely later this year, where each side can try to win on a matter of law.

In the bigger picture, the case is important because it is helping to set the rules over the degree to which companies can treat data controlled by other firms as a public good.

This is just a short summary of a complex decision. If you want to get further into the weeds, here is a marked-up copy of the ruling itself:

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Craigslist gets over 50 billion page views and over 60 million U.S. visitors every month — yet the classified site’s design and mobile strategy appear stuck in the year 2000 (when it first expanded beyond San Francisco). Craigslist offers a barebones mobile view, and it’s recently rolled out some mobile-friendly features like a map view and an image-heavy grid view. But it’s never released its own smartphone or tablet app, and its API is closed.

Plenty of companies have stepped in to try to fill the void, and the most recent of those is Mokriya, a consulting company that has worked on apps for companies like Hipster.

Mokriya’s new Craigslist app for iPhone and Android, which launches Wednesday morning, and is called Mokriya Craigslist, joins third-party Craigslist apps like Craigslist Mobile and c•Mobile. What sets Mokriya Craigslist apart, the company says, is its easily navigable “two-tap” interface and the fact that it’s officially licensing data from Craigslist. The basic version is free; a premium version that allows posting and other features is $0.99.

When you launch the Mokriya Craigslist app, you choose category and city. Listings are then presented in an image-heavy interface. “Browsing Craigslist should be as pleasurable as using Pinterest,” Mokriya founder Sunil Kanderi told me.

To choose a new category, post a listing of your own or ‘favorite’ a listing; all you have to do is tap at the top of the screen. “We built this to solve the problem of having to browse through multiple categories,” Kanderi said. Users can also create alerts so that they’re notified when, say, an apartment that fits their criteria is listed. And the app can use GPS to identify listings near a user’s location. Posting is also streamlined: A user writes a headline and description, chooses photos from his or her camera roll, adds price and category, and that’s it. Browsing listings is free, but to post listings, ‘favorite’ listings or set alerts, you’ll have to pay $0.99 for a premium version. I found a test version of the app smooth and nice to use — which sets it apart from some other unofficial Craigslist apps I’ve tried.

Mokriya officially licensed data from Craigslist prior to building its app. That should help it avoid legal hurdles: In the past, apps that have used Craigslist data without permission have gotten in trouble. This past summer, for example, Craigslist sued apartment search app PadMapper for using its data without a license. Craigslist didn’t answer my question about how many apps it’s licensed its data to (in fact, it didn’t respond to any of my questions for this story), but I imagine that many third-party apps besides Mokriya do have licenses or they’d have gotten cease-and-desist letters by now. (c•Mobile, for instance, notes on its iTunes page that it’s officially licensed.)

Craigslist is also making a little money off Mokriya’s app: “As part of the licensing agreement, Craigslist does get a small revenue cut,” Kanderi told me. “But mostly the licensing agreement ensures that we are in compliance with Craigslist’s terms of use.”

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Lovely is a real estate rental listing company based in San Francisco that went nationwide this fall. It has an agreement with 3taps, the company locked in a legal battle with Craigslist over the ownership of that real estate data, but Lovely also works with landlords and property management companies to independently list available items and aggregate similar postings from across the web. And not surprisingly, compared to the antiquated Craigslist website, it’s well, pretty lovely to use. The company is launching a new iPhone app Wednesday that’s just one of many features modern renters demand.

Like many San Francisco residents, I eventually found my apartment in the city through Craiglist and a lot of luck. But in thinking about the problems with Craigslist – not being able to save listings, not being able to search by map or location, not being able to effectively sort by price or type of apartment — Lovely provides an excellent contrast, and I wish I’d had it available when I moved in May.

The site has all of these features Craigslist lacks and more, allowing users to sort their favorite listings, set alerts on properties they’re interested in, and contact landlords with a basic renter’s bio. Lovely looks most similar to Padmapper, since both sites begin with a map and let users narrow down their search by price and rental type. But the Lovely interface feels a little more modern than Padmapper, and when searching apartments in my neighborhood, it seemed Lovely had far more complete data than Padmapper did.

But if 3taps loses its legal battle with Craigslist and can’t provide that data anymore, could Lovely still prove useful? CEO and founder Blake Pierson said he thinks it can, since they’re working to create direct relationships with landlords and software companies that work with property management groups to post listings.

“Obviously they’re sorting stuff out,” Pierson said of 3taps and Craigslist, noting that 3taps data makes up about one third of data on the site. “But it varies city by city, and would have more of an effect in certain cities than others.”

The new iPhone  app was the most-requested feature from users so far, Pierson said. Lovely isn’t disclosing user numbers yet, but Pierson said he estimates the San Francisco renter market might include 15,000 to 25,000 people, and Lovely has reached about one quarter of those renters so far (in that they’ve checked out a Lovely listing in the city.) Lovely earns revenue from landlords who list their properties on the site that turn into transactions, when renters report that they’ve found their apartment through the site.

Lovely will also experiment with featured listings, but Pierson said he distinguishes the company from competitors like Trulia or Zillow, which rely more on traditional advertising. The company has backing from investors including Keith Rabois, Benjamin Ling, Walter Kortschak and Thomas Byrne.

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In a claim filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, 3Taps accuses Craigslist of operating as an “unchallenged monopolist” to pull in $100 million to $300 million per year. 3Taps asks the court to declare that Craigslist is violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a law that forbids companies from abusing dominant market power.

In particular, 3Taps claims that Craigslist is perpetuating a monopoly through four types of acts: sending sham cease and desist letters against potential competitors; making overly broad copyright claims; imposing improper license terms on users; and “ghosting” (making posts with links to competitors invisibile to other users.

The monopoly allegations are the latest turn in a legal dust-up that began this summer when Craigslist filed a copyright complaint against 3Taps and popular apartment hunting site, PadMapper.

• See also:  Craigslist sues apartment search site PadMapper over listings

The debate turns on who owns the classified ads on Craigslist at a time when up-and-coming companies are creating tools that can show the information in new, visually attractive formats. PadMapper, for instance, lets house hunters see listings superimposed on maps of a neighborhood. Meanwhile, some critics complain that Craigslist’s design and interface is stagnant and stuck in the 1990s.

For its part, Craigslist has suggested that these companies are free-riding on infrastructure that it developed.

The new court filing by 3Taps (embedded below) is fairly dramatic for this type of document and appears geared to further a media strategy aimed at swinging public opinion against Craigslist. But the company’s CEO Greg Kidd also appears to be playing for the win in court by hiring the white shoe law firm Skadden Arps. Here are some selected portions from the complaint (highlights are mine) :

Just as Google, Bing, Ask, or any other general search engine facilitate efficient searches, 3taps enables user-authored ads on craigslist (or any similar public advertising sites) to be efficiently searched. 3taps’ technology provides a previously unrealized public benefit, by enhancing the accessibility of the classified ads of potential sellers by potential buyers.  [...]

Court records show that PadMapper received an extension of time to file a defense to Craigslist’s copyright claim against it. For more background on the case, see Craigslist, 3taps & the court battle for the soul of public data by ReadWriteWeb.

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As reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Craigslist is no longer requiring users to give it permission to bring lawsuits against other sites that reproduce users’ ads.

The once-popular Craigslist has come under withering criticism by Silicon Valley in recent weeks for its decision to sue apartment site PadMapper and to threaten other sites that are using its listings. The critics complain that upstart sites like PadMapper offer useful new services and user-friendly designs while Craigslist’s own design is out-dated and unwieldy.

Craigslist’s decision to give up its exclusive license demands may be a tactical move rather than a change of heart. As we’ve explained before, its exclusive license claims appeared to be unenforceable in the first place.

Meanwhile, Craigslist has given no indication that it will stop its campaign against rivals or backtrack on its decision to remove its listings from search engines. At the same time, the “moderation” section of its terms of service are now jammed with terms that appear aimed at other sites:

CL has the right .. to regulate content … including but not limited to automated and manual screening, blocking, filtering, exclusion from index pages, exclusion from search results, requiring the use of an application programming interface (API), requiring the use of a bulk posting interface, authorization, verification, and the deletion and/or termination of content, accounts and/or all or any use or access)

(Image by Andy Dean photography via Shutterstock)

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Last month, it sued popular site PadMapper for using information from Craigslist to plot apartments on a map. Weeks later, Craigslist changed its terms of service to say that users gave it the right to use their ads for copyright lawsuits (See: Craigslist’s Big Bluff).

As noted by The Verge, the company has now followed up these acts of churlishness by telling search engines like Google and Bing to stop indexing Craigslist results. This effectively turns the taps off the data taps for sites like PadMapper and, at the same time, makes Craigslist’s own listings harder to find.

It’s hard to see who wins in this scenario. Internet users will be deprived of user-friendly sites as Craigslist tries to draw them back into its tortuous 1990′s time warp. And while Craigslist might reclaim some traffic in the short term, it’s likely to alienate users and developers who are increasingly regarding it as an unattractive bully.

(Image by Lentolo via Shutterstock)

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We have written a number of times about how social media and the “democratization of distribution” has compressed the news cycle to the point where the half-life of a scoop is measured in minutes rather than hours or days. And judging by a survey of media attitudes that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just released, the number of people who care about who reported something first is rapidly diminishing — if it was ever that big to begin with. Instead, what matters most to readers and listeners and viewers is the trustworthiness of the source, whether it’s a TV program or a newspaper. Trust, as Newmark likes to say, is “the new black.”

The survey, which was done by a polling firm in January, came out of Newmark’s new venture Craigconnects, which he has said is an effort to help nonprofit entities of all kinds connect with supporters. But the Craigslist founder also has an often-stated passion for the issue of trust and the media — he has called a trustworthy press the “immune system of democracy” — and the survey was designed to look at consumer perceptions of both social media and mainstream media sources such as television, radio, Internet news sites and newspapers, and it was focused specifically on news coverage of the upcoming U.S. election.

When it comes to “perceived credibility,” traditional news outlets can take some comfort from the fact that the survey showed newspapers, cable news and network news sources have the highest levels of credibility, much higher than blogs and social media sources. But the bad news is that only about 22 percent of those surveyed said they found traditional sources to be credible (blogs and social media were seen as credible by just 6 percent). And in a surprising ray of hope for newspapers, those between the ages of 18 and 35 were the most likely to see newspapers as credible, at 33 percent.

The survey also asked what the most valuable quality was for a news source when it came to reporting on election news, and gave respondents a choice between “first to report a story” as well as “free of charge,” “in-depth analysis” and “trustworthy.” Close to 50 percent of those who responded (the survey posed the questions to 1,000 people nationwide) chose trustworthiness as the most important quality, and almost a quarter said that in-depth analysis was the most important. Just 6 percent of those who were asked said it was important that a news outlet be the first to report something.

It’s dangerous to read too much into any survey, if only because people often tell researchers what they want to hear. TV surveys used to find huge numbers of people reporting that they watched PBS or nature shows, when in reality most of them were watching sitcoms. So it is possible that many of the people who filled out Newmark’s survey just said they were interested in in-depth analysis because they wanted to look smart or said “trustworthiness” because it sounded like the right thing to say. But the results definitely fit with the evolving nature of the news business online, one in which the trust of readers (or viewers) is far more important than whether an outlet was the first to report something.

News outlets of all kinds continue to fight over bragging rights to news, like dogs fighting over an old bone: Supporters of the New York Times criticize bloggers like Kashmir Hill for “stealing” a story by summarizing it in a blog post, and news services like Sky News and the Associated Press block their journalists from breaking news on Twitter or other social networks because they think they can somehow “save” it for the wire or for their existing platforms. The reality of the news ecosystem now is that news can be broken by just about anyone, including non-journalists who happen to be close to an event, who often wind up committing what NPR’s Andy Carvin has called “random acts of journalism.”

As the old “bloggers vs. journalists” war continues to rage in different forms and traditional journalists like Dan Lyons at the Daily Beast and Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times criticize what they see as a lack of objectivity in new-media sources, it is worth remembering that trust is the benchmark for any news outlet or media source — regardless of what medium it publishes through or whether those producing the content have degrees from a journalism school or ink beneath their fingers. And Newmark’s survey seems to confirm that the trust game is still wide open for anyone to win.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Lars Plougmann

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The new feature takes some of the selling of Craigslist and tries to simplify it through barcode scanning. When a user scans a product, they can choose to sell it, and ShopSavvy creates a listing of the product with a picture, information and category, and even suggests a recommended price. Users add the condition of the product and how much they want to sell it for.

ShopSavvy then includes the product in local searches by consumers, who scan a product. If a user wants to buy a used product, ShopSavvy sends the seller that person’s email address so they can continue the sale and arrange for delivery. Right now, ShopSavvy doesn’t take a commission on the transaction.

ShopSavvy’s CEO and co-founder Alexander Muse told me SavvyListings was the most requested feature from users. He said the company is waiting to see how it fares first, but if it’s well received, ShopSavvy is looking at instituting a buy-back program, which will would likely work with Best Buy’s buy back system for repurchasing used goods. He said the inclusion of SavvyListings makes ShopSavvy a more robust shopping tool and makes it more attractive than Craigslist for buying and selling.

“On Craigslist, if I remember to go to Craigslist, I can find a good deal, but it’s a 20 percent hit rate. If I want to buy that product now, there’s often not a match. But if you scan a product, you’ll find the best deal new or possibly from a ShopSavvy user,” Muse said. “We are trying to take out things that make Craigslist more challenging for selling, like describing and taking pictures. We’re taking the inertia out and putting in price recommendations and give that as a tool.”

The move also helps ShopSavvy in its competition with Amazon, which also sells used goods. Muse is quick to tout ShopSavvy’s ability to find cheaper listings for products 94 percent of the time compared to Amazon. Muse said the company is taking some of its recent $7 million in funding to layer in more social integration, which can help with SavvyListings by adding more reputation and karma.

It’s still not clear how much people will want to use ShopSavvy to sell, not just buy. But it’s a logical step that gives users an easy way to make some money. And it creates even more value in ShopSavvy’s network of users and helps make ShopSavvy an even more compelling resource for mobile shoppers.

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As Craiglist went dark and Wikipedia prepared to frustrate countless kids with English-language homework assignments by doing the same, U.S.-facing Google.com turned into a SOPA soapbox complete with blacked-out Google logo — a variation on the cute or intricate Google doodles we enjoy so much — and a message urging its millions of U.S. users to sign an anti-SOPA petition to Congress

SOPA is the acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S. House; PIPA, the Protect IP Act, is the U.S. Senate version. Both are viewed by some in Congress and by numerous media and entertainment companies as ways to end the economic damage from piracy. Opponents contend that requiring a blockade of some foreign sites is the end of the web as we know it; the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains.

Click on “I’m feeling lucky” and you go to the usual gallery of doodles, including Monday’s MLK message. But click on the blacked-out logo (one bit is peeking through), and you get a poster promoting the petition. Same goes for the message — “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” — in the space below that is most often used lately to promote Google’s own products. (I’m also getting error messages right now.)

Some will see this as a half-measure — and some a grandstand play, but Google is more likely to earn points for using its bully pulpit. When I tweeted yesterday that Twitter served a protest like the Wednesday internet boycott best by serving as an amplifier, I quickly received a tweet of a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote from @vruz: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

In contrast, HuffingtonPost.com‘s big black box in the lead position on the front page looks at first like part of the protest but it’s being used to illustrate coverage of the protest.

Some other sites are going all the way:

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Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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