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Craigslist v eBay: Craigslist Fights Back
By Joseph Hunkins at May 13, 2008 7 CommentsEbay sued Craigslist some time ago, suggesting that the site had engaged in anti-competitive practices. Craigslist has decided to fight back with a counter lawsuit.
Writing at the Craigslist blog, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, says:
We filed a complaint in California today, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.
We respectfully ask the Superior Court in San Francisco to enjoin this conduct and order eBay to (1) make full restitution to craigslist, (2) disgorge their related profits (3) restore to craigslist all shares of the company acquired by means of, or for the purpose of unfair competition, and (4) pay punitive damages for their malicious behavior.
Ouch!
Labels: Craigslist, eBay
7 Comments
I am so tired of Craigslist and the Craigslist mentality. If you don’t want to be treated like a business, well … don’t operate a business.
The following is taken from the Craigslist FAQ section and sums it up best for me:
Q: Is craigslist a nonprofit?
A: No, craigslist was incorporated as a for-profit in 1999.
You’re a business, get over yourself. eBay is a large corporation and see’s a business opportunity.
Although Craigslist once provided a refreshing approach to web classifieds many many years ago, they have not evolved with the web and are now terribly archaic in functionality.
I wish eBay or someone else with an ounce of business acumen would purchase them, then clean up their site so it’s usable.
craigslist is far more usable than ebay. Ebay is just out to rape there customers for all the money they can get out of them.
I would argue that Craigslist sets usability benchmarks for others to follow. I have bought and sold 80 items on ebay and around 20 on Craigslist. Craigslist search works fine for me and posting an item is far less painless than doing likewise on ebay.
sorry I meant painful, not painless on the last sentencelajdj
valley boy - cheers to that. And unlike almost every other popular service, the provide no API for others to make the site more useful and then shut down sites that try using screen scraping. See: Listpic.
They are a bunch of losers and hypocrites.
Craigslist may be for profit but for most users of craigslist they have saved lot of money for either buying or selling.
I agree that it lacks deep functionality but most people know that functionality comes at a price - Complexity. Smart ones add more functionality than complexity.
However, I digress..
Craigslist is a master of simplicity and that is one big reason it is successful.
You don’t need a need a swiss army knife when most of what you need is just knife.
Enough said and I do respect many of the thoughts expressed. For-profit is not really is an issue for craigslist users.
Its easy use, simple rules, and zero cost (most of the times).
Craigslist is fantastic! Whether or not it is a for-profit, I love the fact that they do what they want to do and not ask everyone to pay for the privilege of using their system. Who needs the tricky, behind your back, our-way-or-the-highway attitude that EBay puts you through?
I once had an interview with PayPal (EBays transaction arm) where the guy told me that someone wanting to pay with their credit card but not wishing to create and login to a PayPal account was “creating an error” that they wanted to try to prevent. I don’t call that an error; I call it letting the user do what s/he wants to do — whether EBay saved an extra 1% to the improvement to their profits or not.