"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."
> You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution...
Rightshaven (copyright troll) was granted the same right by the copyright holders they represent, yet the judge ruled they didn't have standing to sue on the copyright holder's behalf.
The Righthaven case is slightly different, though I hope the logic still applies. (I'm not a lawyer, but I read the Righthaven opinion[1] when the Padmapper/3Taps workaround was originally discussed.) The difference is that Righthaven was granted merely the right to sue on behalf of the original copyright holder, but none of the exclusive rights that copyrights actually bestow upon their owners. It could be interpreted that posters grant Craigslist some of their exclusive rights ("copy, perform, display," etc.), and suing to protect those rights may be legally kosher. I know of no such precedent.
My personal interpretation/hope is that the right to sue for copyright infringement is nontransferable, which would give Craigslist no standing to sue. Individual posters could sue, however.
That's a given. The only way they'd have authorization by the owners of the data would be to e-mail the poster of every CL listing and ask for it. We know they don't do that. The key point is whether there's copyright infringement at all, not whether it was authorized.
And you automatically grant Craigslist your first born child and all future earnings and your left index finger. Laywers love to fill these things with unenforceable outlandish crap. The courts are more discerning.
Err, that's actually a very reasonable Terms of Service.
It says that you own everything you post, but you are granting them the rights to use it. The only unusual bit is that you are additionally granting them the right to go after people who scrape your content on your behalf.
That's not that unusual for sites that contain user-generated content. If someone's hosting a blog full of scraped YouTube videos, YouTube can go after them without contacting the owner of each individual video.
The grant is not exclusive and the authority to decide what is an is not authorized is not claimed by CL. If it is unauthorized they claim rights and causes. You can't have a non-exclusive grant without this distinction.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use