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In this case, the user knew they'd been banned due to the Cease and Desist letter they received.


Yes, but when that Web site gets traffic from the banned IP address, what is the evidence that the person who got the C&D letter was the one responsible for the traffic? The traffic could have been from any customer of the ISP used by the banned user.


While I think that your argument is flawed in its understanding of the law, a technological approach could be: let x be the suspect IP address. When we receive a request from x, we send them some messages that we don't send to other users; or maybe we change messages slightly (like leave out some footers, or with a different image link, whatever). When the fake/modified messages show up on the suspect website, we can reasonably assume that they accessed our website. At that point, it doesn't even matter any more whether they did it through x or another.


Right. Now are beginning to make a little sense -- a big change from the OP.

So, the problem was not getting the data from Craigslist but publishing it elsewhere.

But your point still will not make Craigslist at all happy: Craigslist has a lot of data. Maybe someone, Tom, wants to get a copy of a lot of that data and do some things with it. The data at issue need not be in any meaningful way subject to the marking you describe. That is, what Craigslist sends is HTTP, HTML, CSS, simple text, and maybe some files in JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. Tom can grab just the text, put it into a database, analyze it, and republish leaving the marking far behind.

So, right, if Tom does something sufficiently stupid, then he can be slapped down for violating the C&D letter. Otherwise, not stupid, it's essentially impossible for the Web site to know if Tom honored the C&D letter. Then, searching Tom's computer, etc. will be based on next to no go evidence and be wildly unfair to Tom.




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