Craigslist has settled its long-running lawsuit against 3Taps, which allegedly scraped data from the listings site in order to help developers mesh Craigslist's apartment listings with Google
maps.
The settlement was disclosed in papers filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California. The terms were not revealed.
The move comes three years after Craigslist sued
3Taps, PadMapper and Lovely for allegedly misappropriating real estate listings. PadMapper allegedly combined Craigslist's apartment listings with Google maps, in order to enable people to more easily
search for apartments by neighborhood. Lovely also allegedly drew on Craigslist's offered searchable apartment listings at Livelovely.com Both PadMapper and Lovely obtained the listings from 3Taps,
which scraped Craigslist and makes data accessible to developers, according to Craigslist.
Lovely settled the matter in April for $2.1 million. The lawsuit against PadMapper remains
pending.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California handed Craigslist a key victory in the battle against 3Taps in 2013,
when he refused to dismiss allegations that the data company violated a computer fraud law by accessing Craigslist after it blocked visits from 3Taps' IP addresses. 3Taps allegedly used a proxy server
to circumvent the IP block.
The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation sided with 3Taps on that issue, unsuccessfully arguing in a friend-of-the-court brief that the computer
fraud law shouldn't impose liability on anyone who accesses information that's publicly available online.
When PadMapper and Lovely first introduced their version of Craigslist's real estate
listings, the initiative was hailed by some observers as a welcome innovation. At the time,
Craigslist's site was seen as dated and clunky.
In recent years, however, Craigslist has significantly improved, according to Peter Zollman, founding principal of Advanced Interactive Media
Group, which first reported news of the settlement.
“They have radically improved their look and feel, radically improved their mobile access,” Zollman says of the listings
company. “They now have better ways to sort information, better ways to find information and better ways to view information.”