3TAPS, INC.'S ANSWER AND COUNTERCLAIM Case No. CV-12 ...

12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728requirement within two weeks. Thus, craigslist’s copyright claims are utterly baseless, and noreasonable litigant in craigslist’s position would believe otherwise.157. craigslist’s claim that 3taps has violated its Terms of Use similarly is objectivelybaseless. 3taps does not access craigslist’s website to obtain data, and therefore, is not subject tocraigslist’s Terms of Use. Rather, because craigslist makes its content available to general searchengines (e.g., Google, Bing), this data already is in the public domain. 3taps simply sourced thedata associated with content posted on craigslist from these general search engines.Incredibly, craigslist knew this when it filed suit against 3taps and PadMapper, as well as when itsent cease & desist letters to 3taps’ other partners, such as HuntSmartly, Invatory, for-salealert.com,list-alert.com, Tempest, jumpoffcampus.com, wishcan.com, and SnapStore. On March13, 2012, 3taps sent a letter to craigslist explaining that “3taps does no scraping and hosts only dataavailable from public domain sources that is posted by users. Furthermore, the policy of 3taps withregards to craigslist data is that any sourcing of that data for insertion via our API be done withoutscraping or visiting craigslist at all. As such, neither 3taps nor 3 rd parties posting to the 3taps APIunder our terms are using craigslist to gather data and therefore are not subject to craigslist’s termsof use.” As 3taps further explained, its manner of collecting craigslist’s data is perfectly consistentwith craigslist’s stated wishes. In July 2010, on the question and answer site quora.com, Mr.Newmark responded to the question: “Why hasn’t anyone built any products on top of craigslistdata? Is it a matter of craigslist policy not letting people use the data?” Mr. Newmark wrote:“Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it’s that simple.”Because 3taps does not access craigslist’s website to obtain data, it does not consume anybandwidth on the site. As a result, no reasonable litigant in craigslist’s position would believe thatits claims have any likelihood of success.158. craigslist’s knowledge that 3taps has publicly sourced its data is further evidencedby the fact that, shortly after filing this lawsuit (and two days after craigslist abandoned itsexclusive license requirement), craigslist instructed Google to stop maintaining caches of craigslistcontent. As discussed in more detail below, craigslist’s demand is a blatant and purelyanticompetitive attempt to block 3taps from acquiring craigslist data through general search3TAPS’ ANSWER AND COUNTERCLAIM58CASE NO.: 12-CV-3816-CRB