copyrightable. The court rejected the motion, ruling that Craigslist had adequately alleged that
its users’ ads had a level of creativity that was not trivial and therefore sufficiently original to fall
within the scope of copyright protection. It also ruled that the allegations in the complaint that
Craigslist had decided which categories of ads to include on its web site and under what name
were sufficient to demonstrate a minimal level of creativity to establish that Craigslist could
potentially have a copyright in the compilation of ads on its web site.^3384
The court concluded, however, that Craigslist had acquired sufficient license rights to
have standing to enforce the copyrights in individual user-created ads only with respect to ads
posted in the period from July 16, 2012 through August 8, 2012. During that period, users
submitting ads were presented with a special notice stating that clicking “Continue” confirmed
that Craigslist was the exclusive licensee of the content submitted, with the exclusive right to
enforce against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without
its consent. Outside that limited time period, Craigslist required a posting user to agree only to
its general web site Terms of Use , which stated that the user granted a perpetual, irrevocable,
unlimited license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from and
otherwise use any content posted by the user. Because the Terms of Use license was not stated
as being exclusive, it was insufficient to give Craigslist standing to enforce the individual user
ads.^3385
IV. CONCLUSION
Copyright law provides one of the most important forms of intellectual property
protection on the Internet. Considerable challenges are presented, however, in adapting
traditional copyright law, which was designed to deal with the creation, distribution and sale of
protected works in tangible copies, to the electronic transmissions of the online world in which
copies are not tangible in the traditional sense, and it is often difficult to know precisely where a
copy resides at any given time within the network.
The most difficult aspect of adapting copyright law to the online world stems from the
fact that virtually every activity on the Internet – such as browsing, caching, linking,
downloading, accessing information, and operation of an online service – involves the making of
copies, at least to the extent the law treats electronic images of data stored in RAM as “copies”
for purposes of copyright law. In short, “copying” is both ubiquitous and inherent in the very
nature of the medium. If the law were to treat all forms of “copying” as infringements of the
copyright holder’s rights, then the copyright holder would have very strong control over Internet
use of the copyrighted work. Which forms of copying the law should deem to be within the
control of the copyright owner and which should not presents a very difficult challenge.
The cumulative effect of the copyright holder’s rights being implicated by every use of a
work on the Internet may be to give the copyright owner the equivalent of exclusive rights of
“transmission and access” of information. Indeed, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO
(^3384) Craigslist Inc. v. 3Taps Inc., 942 F. Supp. 2d 962, 971-72 (N.D. Cal. 2013).
(^3385) Id. at 972-74.