4 sale, bby shoes, nvr worn

That might be how Hemingway would write it now, if he were writing it on Craigslist.

Craigslist? Yes: Craigslist is to human longing as the Great Library of Alexandria was to philosophy. It is the single greatest repository of naked need in human history. But where are the odes to Craigslist? Where is its Poet Laureate?

In answer to this, PuSh, a groundbreaking performing arts festival in Vancouver, is debuting the 80-minute comedy musical "Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata," by Canadian legends Bill Richardson and Veda Hille.

The project, which originally began as a short piece commissioned for PuSh three years ago, opened Jan. 19 as full-length production that runs until Feb. 11 at the Arts Club Revue stage on Granville Island. After that, companies from all over the country are lined up and waiting to bring it to their cities.

I caught up with Richardson at the Vancouver Library for a quick interview on the art of turning dross into gold, or classifieds into fine art, or at least cabaret. Here's our interview:

Richardson is indeed legendary in Canadian intellectual circles for his popular show on CBC radio as well as for his award-winning books like Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast.

He also turned out to have once shared a neighborhood with me.

The interview got off to a good start when I described an art project I used to admire in the same neighborhood. It was simply “the most beautiful art project I ever saw,” I told him. As I described the work—dozens upon dozens of steel kitchen ladles suspended from invisible thread, each holding a tiny votive candle and revolving slowly in the draft—his face softened, and he cast his eyes downward.

“That was my house,” said Richardson, softly. “That was my art project, and thank you. I hardly got any feedback on that at the time, so thank you.”

Note to self: begin all interviews this way.

Once settled into his chair in the atrium of the Vancouver Central Library, he amiably expanded on the origin, development and meaning of "Do You Want What I Have Got?"

After a disillusioning experience with online classifieds, Richardson looked to Craigslist to see what it could teach him about his own needs and those of its inexhaustible supply of strangers, some stranger than others. The result was popular enough that Richardson and Hille, who normally earns her crust composing indie rock, were commissioned to turn it into a full-length piece.

All the songs in the piece have their origin in real ads, so all of the heartache, kink, and barely-repressed urges (to celebrity, to notoriety, to serenity) are genuine to someone, somewhere. Yes, even the one about the guy with the bathtub full of noodles in which you must sit for at least five minutes (do not bring sauce!).

It’s tempting, but not that easy, as it turns out, to simply poke fun at these sometimes-desperate expressions of human need.

Instead, the (excellent) performers are given rein to find dignity in any and all strange situations. There’s the man who just wants to trade his fresh chili for some weed and company (and is also, by the way, interested in meeting fellow men for casual coffee ... in their underwear ... and maybe hugs ... but he’s NOT GAY!). You will never hear the words, “But I’m TOTALLY NOT GAY” delivered with quite as much querulous, Ethel Merman-esque, conviction, ever again.

The songs may mock, but they mock fondly, reminding the audience that we are all human, and therefore all ridiculous.

Is the Internet a dividing force, or is it one place where otherwise lost souls can connect with, say, someone who really needs their 300 stuffed penguins, who really understands them? The penguins? Or the owners? Or is the one just the manifestation of the other’s dreams and desires? These are the questions asked by the Craigslist Cantata.

In our interview, Richardson mused on the authenticity of the piece: did it lose by being static, with fixed songs, fixed lines, fixed roles, when the material on which it is based is ever-changing?

Essentially, a theatre piece can only be a snapshot of a point in time, and this one reflects some of the best, quirkiest, or most moving Craigslist postings of the past couple of years, but doesn’t pretend to be a re-creation of the Internet at a particular moment. For one thing, there’s just too much of it.

The commodification of human interaction is one of the defining themes not only of the Craigslist Cantata, but of our age; how seemingly simple, commercial offerings speak eloquently, if unintentionally, of the fundamental need for connection.

As the song goes, Can Anybody See Me (if there’s no value attached).

Lyrics from R.I.P Steve

And as I search on craigslist
I do pause to reflect
Without the platform built at NeXT
We might not have these interwebs
I Mac I Phone I Pad I miss you Steve
RIP I do believe you when you said
“for the really big big things you have to trust me”
I trust you now
oh wow
oh wow
oh wow

N-Control can’t catch a break from the Internet.

You may remember the game controller company from its legendary public relations disaster in December of last year.

Now the company has become the subject of a Craigslist hoax: a fake job listing which has already begun proliferating around the Internet as unverified fact.

It wasn't posted by the company, a representative told the Daily Dot.

“Love Gaming and Selling Great New Products? Look No Further” reads a phony recruitment ad posted to the New York and Los Angeles Craigslist earlier today.

The ad continues: “We’re looking for talented sales people who love video games and are ready to earn generous commissions each month.”

The joke? N-Control’s PR disaster came thanks to the destructive ineptitude of its former marketing manager, Paul Christoforo. Christoforo’s tactless  and rude emails to customers made their way to gaming site Penny Arcade in December, and soon he was trading digital punches with pretty much the entire gaming Internet. And losing, terribly.

Christoforo, it turns out, was a contractor, hired on the cheap to do PR and customer service for the relatively small company. So yes, it sure would be funny if N-Control were at it again, hiring strangers of dubious qualifications from Craigslist.

Except the letter is a hoax, according to N-Control’s current PR chief Moisés Chiullan.

“Consider it categorically denied,” Chiullan told the Daily Dot in an email. “I had Criagslist take it down.”

This PR disaster of epic proportions had been nipped in the bud, it appears. Sorry, Internet.

Want to read Reddit but don’t have the time? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the social news site—every morning.

• It's an entertaining morning in the r/IAmA universe. Here are the top three posts this morning: 1) I am David Copperfield, 2) IAmA result of a woman drinking during pregnancy (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), 3) IAmA girl who sells her panties on craigslist. (r/IAmA)

• Is the U.S. Army manipulating Reddit? (r/theoryofreddit)

• r/askreddit lists out the best open-source replacements to expensive, name-brand software. (r/AskReddit)

• Watch the deconstruction of a popular comment in real time: Redditor Im_just_saying's comment on the cultural influences that created English cuss words hit the top of r/bestof. Now the post has made it to r/askhistorians, where the redditor's assumptions and conclusions aren't doing so well. (r/bestof)

• Are you a scientist? r/askscience needs you! (r/askscience)

• A weird and quite despicable scam is nipped in the bud at r/askreddit. (r/AskReddit)

• I'm astonished by the breadth and detail in these responses to a very specific question about glass making. If you are an amateur glassmaker, forget about books or any other kind of material, and head to r/askscience. (r/askscience)

Pic of the day: The shortest route to visit Sweden's 24978 cities by road (and ferry) (r/MapPorn)
Hottest subreddit: r/FanTheories (1 day)

Photo by Puck777

Each weekend on Pin the News, Josh Davis of LL Social and Lauren Orsini of the Daily Dot analyze the latest Pinterest happenings and provide insider tips for making the most of the network.

Have you noticed a significant gain or loss in your follower count on Pinterest? It’s not anything you’re doing differently; it’s a new change in the Pinterest algorithm that will soon pave the way for some long-awaited features.

Lauren wrote about interviewing Christine Martinez, the tenth most followed person on Pinterest. Interested in becoming a power pinner? We talk about to what Martinez attributes her own success.

There are hundreds of Pinterest clones out there, so when Josh highlights one, you can expect that it stands out from the crowd. Hipswap bills itself as Craigslist for the Pinterest set.

Pinterest’s stickiness is one of its greatest strengths, but can a network be too sticky? Here we discuss the difficulties other sites, especially news sites, have getting pinners to click pins.

On the same topic, Josh points out that with or without click-throughs, it’s highly beneficial for businesses to have a presence on Pinterest. Here’s why.

To finish the week off on the lighter side, Lauren shares an Applebees advertising campaign that tells women they’re spending too much time on Pinterest. Good advice or just sexism? Here’s what we think.

Want to watch the episode all at once? Visit our playlist here.

Photo via YouTube

Every day, the Daily Dot finds something that people on Facebook are sharing and, in turn, shares it with you—with a little explanation. Here's today's share.

The Internet has a way of finding candidates for Worst Parent Ever.

This latest one’s on Craigslist.

According to a “for sale” ad, a Los Angeles parent—gender is unclear—is selling a son’s laptop to buy him a newer, better one. Why? “We made a deal that if he chose to be straight, that we would buy him nice things.”

“My son was committing homosexual acts,” the parent adds, nevertheless insisting “I’m a good parent and I’m working with him to correct his problem.”

Almost 4,000 aghast users have shared a screengrab of the ad, uploaded by the group Wipe Out Homophobia Wednesday afternoon.

It’s unclear if the ad ever even existed, since if you travel to its URL, you’ll see whatever content used to be there has been flagged for removal. Even if it was really posted, it’s so easy to put up fake posts on Craigslist, there’s very little chance we’ll ever know that user’s intent.

An email sent by the Daily Dot to the anonymized Craigslist email in the ad bounced back, saying the post “has expired or has been deleted.”

Still, most users expressed nothing but outrage.

“How is she going to correct HER problem?” asked Saify Talib.

“This is called ‘Spoil the gay away,’” wrote Oliver Sun.

A few noticed the fine print: that the ad is offering a used 15-inch MacBook pro for $1,300, and is “pretty firm on the price.”

“‎1300 dollars for a used macbook? Wtf is this trash?” asked Cameron Barron.

Exactly. You can get a refurbished 15” MacBook Pro for $1,050, and with free shipping to boot.

Photo by dr_XeNo

When the economy tanked in 2008, so did the construction company Joe Raineri worked for.

The large remodeling jobs in San Jose, Calif., dried up, and smaller jobs were few and far between.

“Joe isn’t used to free time; he has always been a really hard worker,” Lisa Raineri, his wife, told the Daily Dot. “And for a while, neither of us were working at all.”

With a lot of time to fill and six children to feed in late 2009, Raineri, then 49, picked up a saw and decided to fashion a pile of scrap wood in the backyard into a designer table. After it was completed, the couple didn’t know where to sell it or for how much. So they turned to Craigslist, a classified advertisement website, where the the family had sold children’s toys and Joe had purchased construction supplies from in the past.

Within minutes, the couple received dozens of responses. The dining room table eventually sold for $600.

“We were really down on our luck and it was right before Christmas and I was panicking that I couldn’t give the kids the kind of Christmas they were used to, Lisa recalled.

“I thought that if we could sell a table or two, we could get through Christmas. Craigslist was huge for us.”

Three years and hundreds of tables later, the Raineris have made handcrafted furnishings their livelihood. The family currently owns Terra Amico, a custom furniture business that makes everything from tables to queen-sized bed frames.

The family receives about 10 orders a week and has started building for restaurants and small businesses, including almost all of the furniture for the San Pedro Square Market in Downtown San Jose. Lisa handles the business and marketing, while Trevor, the couple’s 18-year-old son, helps Joe with designs. And while the business has grown tremendously, at least half of the referrals and much of the building materials still come from Craigslist, Joe said:

“We are on Craigslist every night. There are so many people who are looking to replace decks, deconstruct old structures and remodel and just want someone to come take the wood so they don’t have to pay dump fees. And we are happy to come and take that beautiful natural resource off their hands.”

Terra Amico is still run out of the family’s home, and the San Pedro market is used as their showroom to meet clients and promote their work. With the days of unemployment now a distant memory, Joe offered the following advice to those looking for a fresh start.

“I would tell them to not let that fear keep them from trying something new that they believe in,” he said. “Be creative. There are lots of ways to start a business without a lot of money, especially with social media. Put yourself out there. Show your passion. People will respond.”

Photo by Lisa Raineri

Show of hands: How many people have ever used Craigslist to find something they need?

Now keep those hands up if you've ever taken a minute to actually get to know someone with whom you've made a Craigslist deal. Keep 'em there if you've ever done the two—finding what you need and getting to know the dealmaker—exclusively for every day for an entire month.

If your name's not Joe Garner, and you still have your hand in the air, you're lying.

Garner is the director and star of Craigslist Joe, a documentary—released today—that follows his daring attempt to live entirely off of the massive classified listings site.

"I've gone skydiving, but I wouldn't say that I'm a thrill seeker," Garner, 29, told the Daily Dot. "I don't have to go out and do crazy stuff and interact with as many people as I can. It's just that a lot of times I can get stuck into my routine, and I try to make a conscious effort to break out of that and mix it up.

“This was the biggest thing that I have done to try to satisfy that need."

For 31 days in December 2008, Garner lived entirely off the Craigslist land. He started out in his hometown of Los Angeles with nothing but a laptop, cell phone, toothbrush, and the clothes on his back—and he ended up in San Francisco.

In between, Garner traveled to Portland, Ore.; Seattle, Wash.; Chicago, Ill.; New York City, N.Y..; New Orleans, La.; and San Francisco, Calif.— using nothing but the help of Craigslist's infinitely robust network, one that Garner attests is far more of a community than the site's low tech, no frills interface would have you believe.

"I was never an avid Craigslister before this," Garner said. "I'd go there to find an apartment or look for an odd job here or there, but I wasn't a devoted user.

"What I found was that there are people who are. The whole time, I felt this unified feeling of a much larger community out there. I didn't have the feeling when I was going and interacting with these people that they were isolated, separate events that had no relation to each other."

That community gets personified through the Craigslisters Garner meets throughout the month. There's Travis Shivers in Los Angeles and Mohammad Al-Maly in Seattle—people who opened up their homes and offer Garner rides when he needed them.

These people are about more than just selling bookshelves and posting odd jobs for afternoon work. They're proverbial shelters from the storm. They're a community that's set out to expose each other to differences and learn through immersion—something that Garner realized only a few short days into his journey.

"A theme emerged pretty quickly when I was up in Seattle with that woman Susan and then at Mohammed's parents's house," Garner remembered. "That was kind of the first time that I realized this was much more than a story about my own survival. There's a bigger thing going on here: a desire to connect. Even in the face of adversity, the resilience that a lot of people showed was really inspiring."

Garner hasn't maintained the same level of Craigslist immersion since he completed his month on the site, but he admits that he does use the massive site—which sees more than 60 million unique visits per month in the United States alone—differently than he once did.

"There are all sorts of other sections—the community meet ups, the events page," he said. "There are rants and raves where people get going and talk about whatever's bothering them.

"I've heard stories about how people have furnished their entire apartment on Craigslist, or gotten a job, or found a date. It's not like you're emailing a website that will spit out a response for you. There are individuals like myself out there, and there are sections that are geared towards interaction and meeting other people."

Photo via Facebook

Craigslist seems to have taken a leaf out of Twitter’s book by restricting third-party access to its listings. As a result, it will be a little more difficult for people to find an apartment through PadMapper.

The classifieds site apparently blocked search engines from indexing its listings, meaning data providers like 3Taps can’t grab Craigslist posts through general search engines. In an statement on its website, 3Taps said:

“At approximately noon on Sunday August 5th, Craigslist instructed all general search engines to stop indexing CL postings -- effectively blocking 3taps and other 3rd party use of that data from these public domain sources. We are sorry that CL has chosen this course of action and are exploring options to restore service but may be down for an extended period of time unless we or CL change practices. As soon as we know more, we will share it here and on our Twitter account.”

Before the purported clampdown, 3Taps provided developers with free access to data on Craigslist posts so they could build their own apps and services. The move most prominently affects PadMapper, which offers apartment seekers the ability to look through rental listings on a map display, rather than having to click through endless numbers of individual Craigslist posts.

The fallout has escalated for some time, seemingly coming to a head last month when Craigslist filed a lawsuit against PadMapper and 3Taps over the use of Craigslist data. Among other  complaints, it accused them of breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition.

Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter to PadMapper in June, though the third-party site’s founder, Eric DeMenthon, added Craiglist listings to PadMapper again in early July. He claimed that 3Taps’s service did not violate Craigslist’s terms of use, since it obtained the data indirectly.

However, last week, Craigslist added a new rule for those posted listings, saying that it is the “exclusive licensee” for content in listings. That meant 3Taps and other third-party data providers are effectively banned from using any descriptions used in Craigslist posts.

As Craigslist user HelpfulHadda claimed, “A copy of a copy of the original is still a copyright violation.”

Many apartment seekers found it much easier to seek an apartment through PadMapper than Craigslist’s clunky links for each individual ad. Being able to see exactly where apartments are located at a glance helped them discover which places they wanted to rent more efficiently. User ikalita laid out in a post on Craiglist’s forums why this is especially useful to someone moving to a new city.

Twitter users were angry and disappointed as well.

“No one would have to do this if your search didn't suck, Craigslist. You're only hurting yourself here,” Eric Ravenscraft wrote.

In response to that tweet, @37kyle complained, “that fucking blows. I did notice padmapper looked very sparse yesterday on my apt hunt.”

Another Twitter user was more blunt in his assessment: “Craigslist is now offering a master course in How To Be A Dick.”

It’s not only apartment seekers who are peeved. Craigslist user joshmi wrote that Craigslist’s clampdown makes it much more difficult to carry out multi-city searches.

“The stuff I am looking for is very rare,” joshmi commented. “Typically no more that one or two items will be listed in the entire country. Craiglist is not doing me or the seller a favor by inhibiting 3taps very useful features.”

PadMapper already had a contingency plan in place. In a June blog post, DeMenthon pointed out that he’d been preparing for Craigslist’s banhammer for a couple of years and had added a way for people to post apartment listings directly on his site.

However, it seems like the complaints may not be accurate. a Hacker News commenter suggested that Google still has access to Craigslist posts after all. Perhaps the search engine block was a giant misunderstanding.

Photo by turkeychik/Flickr

Just who owns the data on Craigslist?

Data-scraping company 3taps is countersuing Craigslist in an attempt to dislodge the ad company’s alleged monopoly control of its data.

The anti-trust suit argues that Craigslist’s classified advertising business constitutes a monopoly in multiple markets—an assertion with which many in the newspaper industry, whose business has been kidney-punched by the online service, would no doubt enthusiastically agree.

3taps maintains that Craigslist has used cease-and-desist letters, lawsuits and other legal tools to shut down competition. Should 3taps’s suit succeed, we may see a plethora of businesses crop up that use, and add value to, the information currently mostly siloed inside the Craigslist website.

You have to wonder if newspapers, long the late-adopting hangers-on in the classifieds wars, will leverage Craigslist information to plump up their anaemic ad pages.

In July, Craigslist filed suit against 3tap, which advertises itself as “API for Access to Craigslist Data,” as well as against apartment rental mapping company Padmapper, for stealing their data. Both companies "misappropriate wholesale and commercially exploit,” according to Craigslist. Padmapper had initially yielded to a June cease-and-desist letter, but then went back to including Craigslist data, which it gathered via 3taps’s API instead of directly from the site.

According to Mike Melanson on ReadWriteWeb, 3taps will answer Craigslist’s suit today—this afternoon, in fact, according to a representative of the company—as well as file an antitrust suit against the company, “alleging that Craigslist maintains a monopolistic control over numerous markets related to online classified advertising.”

A copy of the response is available via Melanson on Slideshare.

3taps’s CEO Greg Kidd asserts that, as "public facts are public property," Craigslist doesn’t have a leg to stand on in presuming that its data is proprietary. Further, 3tap did not take the info from Craigslist’s servers, but rather from publicly-indexed information, strengthening the case that the doesn’t belong to Craigslist anyway.

That public facts are in fact public property is well-established copyright law. But, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s attorney Kurt Opsahl notes in Melanson’s article, “what may not be clear cut in this case is whether or not a Craigslist ad is pure fact or contains an element of creativity that can be copyrighted.” But even if it does, is the copyright owned by Craigslist or by the person who put the ad on Craigslist?

Photo by Cory Doctorow/Flickr

Craigslist is getting a lot more useful when it comes to searching for a new crib, with the addition of a map view. However, the feature comes at the expense of shutting out other popular services which mapped apartment listings.

Not all towns have the map view just yet, though folks seeking a new place to live in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles can immediately get a sense of where apartments are located.

It’s not pinpointing the location of all apartment listings on a single city just yet, The Next Web reported, though it’s somewhat useful in finding out how many apartments are available in a given neighborhood.

After clicking on a numbered icon in an apartment hotspot, the map zooms in, and breaks down the data into other, smaller areas, as shown in these screenshots:

Once you’ve zoomed in far enough on a specific area, you can click on individual listings. It’s likely to be super-handy if you’re seeking a new place and location, location, location is the most important factor for you. The traditional text-based listings are also still available, if that’s more convenient for you.

But these features aren't entirely new. A number of popular third-party sites provided maps based on Craigslist's apartment data—at least until Craigslist moved to shut them down early this year.

In August, Craigslist tried blocking data providers like 3Taps from scraping information on listings by denying search engines from indexing all the data. It sent a cease-and-desist letter to popular apartment search service PadMapper in June, ordering that site to stop using Craigslist data to map apartment listings, and followed up by filing a lawsuit in July.

Last month, 3taps countersued Craigslist, alleging that Craigslist had a monopoly in a number of markets with its classified ads business, and accusing the company of using legal tools to shut out the competition.

Whether or not you agree with Craigslist’s decision to go on the offensive against others who built maps using its data, the map view is likely to prove a useful tool for many.

Photo by quinn.anya/Flickr

Even if you don’t usually monitor political news, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the upcoming Supreme Court case Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley and Sons; the court will start hearing oral arguments on Oct. 29. Depending how the court rules, it’s possible almost the entire U.S. secondhand market will be outlawed: no more buying or selling used stuff on eBay or Craigslist, at yard sales or thrift stores – and maybe no more lending or borrowing in public libraries, either.

Like most Supreme Court cases, Kirtsaeng is a complex issue comprising a number of smaller ones, including copyright law, first sale doctrine, and the “gray market” (buying legal, low-priced items overseas and selling them in the U.S. at a markup).

In 1997, Supap Kirtsaeng left his native Thailand to study at Cornell University, where he had the quintessentially American college experience of discovering his required course textbooks were extremely expensive. But those books sold for much lower prices in Thailand, so he asked relatives back home to buy cheap copies and mail them to him. In addition to the books he used in his own classes, he also sold copies to bargain-hunting American students on eBay, making almost $1.2 million in profit.

Textbook manufacturer John Wiley sued Kirtsaeng, arguing that his actions violated Wiley’s copyrights on the books; Kirtsaeng countered that his actions were legal under the first sale doctrine.

The Department of Justice’s criminal resource manual says this about copyright and first sale [italics lifted from the original]:

“The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy.”

In other words, a copyright owner only controls the first sale of a copyrighted item. If you write, publish and sell a book, you have the exclusive right to print new copies of it, and you collect a royalty the first time a particular copy of your book sells. Whoever buys your book owns that particular copy, and henceforth can lend it to others, resell it, or even destroy it, without interference from you, the copyright holder. That’s why it’s legal for libraries to buy books and lend them out, and also legal for secondhand shops to buy and sell used books and DVDs, without payment to the original copyright holders.

So at first glance, Kirtsaeng v. Wiley seems pretty straightforward: Copyright holder Wiley got its cut at point of first sale (which happened to be in Thailand), then buyer Kirtsaeng owned the books and the right to resell them. Why must the Supreme Court get involved?

Because, after Wiley sued Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement in lower courts, the courts ruled that first sale doctrine – the idea that once you legally buy stuff, it’s legally your stuff to sell as you please – only applies to stuff manufactured and first sold in the U.S.

The business-technology blog Channelnomics noted, “In effect, everything with any sort of foreign trademark—from an Apple Inc. iPhone to an Omega watch to a piece of period furniture crafted in France—now requires express permission of, and presumably additional payment to, the foreign entity that created it in order to be sold.”

That mention of Omega watches alludes to a 2010 Supreme Court decision, Costco v. Omega, which Wiley’s attorneys will likely cite as precedent against Kirtsaeng. The Swatch watch company sells its Omega-brand luxury watches in overseas markets for much lower prices than in the U.S. Discount retailer Costco took advantage of this price differential by buying relatively inexpensive watches overseas, then selling them in U.S. stores at a profit. When other stateside retailers complained, Omega began putting copyrighted designs on its watches, then cited copyright law as a reason why Costco could no longer import foreign-bought watches for U.S. resale.

The Supreme Court ruled against Costco in December 2010, at which time the Daily Finance noted: “part of the copyright law makes it unclear if the ‘first sale doctrine’ applies when the product is manufactured outside the U.S. and the ‘first sale’ is out of the U.S. It's this issue that the Court effectively failed to decide this time.”

And it’s this issue the court will presumably decide in Kirtsaeng. There’s a lot more at stake here than whether Americans can legally resell their foreign-made possessions; back in 2010 the Daily Finance mentioned another implication of the Omega ruling:

“As Google, eBay and others supporting Costco noted, letting Omega control the resale price of goods manufactured and first sold abroad, but not the resale price of goods manufactured in the U.S. and first sold abroad (that was a different case decided before this one) provides a strong incentive (on top of any others, like cheaper labor, lack of environmental laws, etc.) to move manufacturing jobs out of the U.S.”

In other words, if the Supreme Court sides with Wiley against Kirtsaeng, copyright holders would actually be foolish to produce anything in the US: if they manufacture and sell items here, they only get paid at the point of first sale. But if they make something overseas to sell here, they effectively control it forever.

This would surely benefit foreign manufacturers. But what would it mean for ordinary US citizens? Library Journal noted that “Taken to its extreme, this approach might also enable publishers to prohibit a library from circulating foreign-printed books,” though “both Wiley and the U.S. solicitor general are at pains to provide legal theories that accommodate library lending in particular.”

But even if libraries are exempt from the rule, it would still be detrimental to ordinary US citizens wishing to buy or sell secondhand items. In a brief filed in the Kirtsaeng case, eBay observed that “imposing a place of manufacturing requirement on the first sale doctrine infringes consumers’ rights to redistribute goods ... copyright owners who have already been compensated for these goods [at point of first sale] are now attempting to use copyright law to hamper the ability of consumers and re-sellers to redistribute goods and comparison shop from different vendors.”

People who buy certain software already experience similar limitations: it’s illegal to sell your used copies of Microsoft Office or Rosetta Stone because you can’t officially buy the software; you only buy a license to use it. If Wiley gets its way in the Supreme Court then, technically speaking, almost everything you have (unless it’s stamped “Made in USA”) will be subject to similar restrictions: you won’t really “own” your UK-edition Harry Potter books or made-in-Switzerland watches anymore than you “own” the latest edition of Windows; they’re still under control of their copyright holders, and you only have permission to use them.

After all – if you’re legally forbidden to sell something, how can you really say it’s “yours”?

Photo by Gaelx/Flickr

For $10,000 you can now control Sweden—or its official Twitter account, anyway.

The @Sweden account is controlled by a different Swedish citizen each week, and this week’s curator, Christian Blodkorv, has—probably jokingly—put it up for sale on Craigslist. He is “selling” the Twitter account because Visit Sweden, the tourism board that runs the @Sweden program, is facing budget cuts and is “in need of money.”

“You are buying a twitter-account with 66,200 dedicated followers spread across the world,” wrote Blodkorv on the Craigslist posting.  

“Take this oppurtunity [sic] to get your hands on one of the coolest twitter-accounts in the world! USD 10000 or more, let me know your bid directly to my mail,” he wrote. Blodkorv, 29, posted a picture of himself looking forlorn in Craigslist’s New York City section on Thursday night.

If you do wire him the $10,000, which exchanges to more than 66,000 Swedish Kroner, you won’t have a lot of time to troll its followers, as Blodkorv has done so flawlessly for the past week.

“I will send you the password as soon as the money is [in] my account, but please hurry, they will change curator on Sunday,” he said.

While Blodkorv’s stunt is in-line with his other deadpan and sardonic tweets, a Visit Sweden official tells The Daily Dot they don’t find it as amusing.

“Of course he doesn't have the right to sell something that is not his,” wrote Maria Ziv, Visit Sweden’s director of marketing, adding that the organization will have an internal conversation about Blodkorv’s posting.

“Since he neither has the password to send out nor the legal right to sell what isn’t his we are not too concerned,” she said.

As of Friday morning, Blodkorv said he’s only received two bids: one from this reporter and one from the Foreign Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, who is offering“27 barrels of raw oil,” he joked.

We’ll take it, as long as we can have Sonja, too.

Photo via Craigslist

Craigslist is known as a place to swap hook-up stories, but a New Yorker is using it for something just as essential to share: license plates.

In a message posted to the “Items wanted” category on the Brooklyn section, a crafty resident is asking fuel-thirsty people if they want to switch license plates. It’s an attempt to maneuver around the gas rationing rules New York has imposed on its residents to alleviate hoarding and long lines that are crowding city gas stations after Superstorm Sandy.

The state is allowing people with license-plate numbers ending in odd numbers or a letter to fuel up Friday, while drivers with even numbers or a zero can purchase gas on Saturday.

“I have an even-numbered plate and am looking for a buddy with an odd-numbered plate. If you need gasoline on an even-numbered day I will lend you my plates. If I need gas on an odd-numbered day you lend me your plates,” wrote the unknown poster, only listing their location as Park Slope, Brooklyn.

To ensure the veracity of the plates, the post creator is suggesting that those interested to show up at the station in their vehicles with paper plate registrations and window stickers on their the cars.

“We would have to leave collateral for the borrowed plates to insure their safe return. The plates of the other should do,” they said.

The poster did not respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment about whether they’ve found their license-plate buddy.

Photo via Hashgram/@suzyn2001

It goes without saying, but be careful with your sperm on the Internet.

A Kansas court has ordered a man to pay child support for a daughter he fathered after responding to a Craigslist ad from two Topeka lesbians seeking sperm donations.

William Marotta, 43, thought he was doing a good deed three years ago when he donated his sperm to Angela Bauer and her partner Jennifer Schreiner.

“We are foster and adoptive parents, and now we desire to share a pregnancy and birth together,” Bauer, 40, wrote in the Craigslist ad.

Marotta waived the $50 fee the couple wanted to pay him, then signed a contract that excluded him from any future financial responsibility for the child.

The couple split up in 2010, but they continued to share parenting responsibility for their eight children, most of whom they adopted.

Earlier this year, Scheiner, 34, filed to receive welfare benefits for the 3-year-old, whom the couple could no longer support financially after Bauer was forced to stop work for health reasons.

The Kansas Department of Children and Families (KDCF) wasn't interested in helping out, however. Instead, they demanded Sheiner hand over the identity of the father so he could pay child support. KDCF also declared void the contract Marotta had signed with the couple, which was supposed to absolve him of any financial responsibility for the child.

Why? The insemination wasn't handled by a licensed physician—a prerequisite, apparently, for making the contract valid under Kansas law.

Marotta is challenging the ruling in court, and a hearing is scheduled for Jan. 8. His lawyer has argued that the case would set an unsavory precedent. If sperm donors bear financial responsibility for their children, than "any woman in Kansas could have sperm donations shipped to her house, inseminate herself without a licensed physician and seek out the donor for financial support because her actions made him a father, not a sperm donor.”

Marotta, a mechanic and foster parent who lives with his wife in Kansas, has yet to speak to the press. But Bauer and Scheiner want him to know that they wholeheartedly support his motion to dismiss.

“We’re kind of at a loss,” Bauer told the Topeka Capital-Journal. “We are going to support him in whatever action he wants to go forward with.”

She added: “This was a wonderful opportunity with a guy with an admirable, giving character who wanted nothing more than to help us have a child. I feel like the state of Kansas has made a mess out of the situation.”

Photo by Grace Hebert/Flickr

Police in New York City are looking for a man who pretended to sell a laptop on Craigslist only to pepper-spray the would-be buyer in the face and steal his cash.

It all transpired the morning after Christmas in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, N.Y. A 27-year-old man, responding to the Craigslist ad for a $350 used laptop, approached the seller and handed over his cash. But instead of a laptop, he received a blast of pepper spray to his face.

The thief immediately fled the scene. Police have yet to catch him, though they have released a photograph of the suspect.

Amazingly, this is not the first time a brazen theft, Craigslist, and weaponized capsaicin have intersected for a bizarre crime story.

Back in 2008, Anthony Curcio, 28, pepper-sprayed a pair of armored truck security guards, disabling them and wresting away a bag filled with $400,000 in cash. Curcio, donning a wig and a facemask, had a devious trick up his sleeve. Earlier, he'd placed an ad on Craigslist, offering a simple job: Show up outside the Bank of America in Monroe, Washington, dressed up in a wig and facemask.

As the decoys unknowingly distracted policed, Curcio hopped into an inner tube waiting for him in a nearby creek and floated away. He was eventually caught, however, this time without any decoys to save him. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

The solution to this growing trend of pepper spray crimes? More pepper spray, of course. The next time you answer that Craigslist ad for that used $20 La-Z-Boy, make sure you show up packing some heat.

Photo via DonkeyHotey/Flickr

One man's parody of every negative, obsessive joke you've ever heard about Trekkies went right over everyone's heads this week, with hilarious results all the way down.

"Nothing weird is going to happen," promises the last line of this hilarious Craiglist ad in an Edmonton personals section.

It's the punchline of a well-crafted joke that gets funnier with each line as it skewers geeks by glancing off age-old stereotypes about their obsession with nerd trivia, their creepy, fantasy-laden behavior, and their arrested adulthood development.

The ad calls for “2 or 3 women for Star Trek roleplaying” and specifies at length that it wants comers to supply Next Generation costumes only. The author wants nothing to do with that male chauvinist Captain Kirk.

"I built a bridge in my mom's garage and a small shuttlecraft," it reads. "Maybe my mom will make lunch."

The author caps it all off with a hilariously alarming line, which, after a suitable amount of time, he struck through, as though the author has realized it might not be the wisest thing to advertise: "T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶p̶a̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶t̶o̶r̶'̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶a̶d̶ ̶(̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶)̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶.̶"

The ad is just realistically socially awkward and amusingly worrying enough that everyone bought it.  It went viral, and according to the author, brought a flurry of media inquiries and even talk show invites.

The problem—or perhaps the relief, in this instance—is that the author was trolling. The writer created a Tumblr at letsmakeitso with the aim of clarifying the joke.

"It might be difficult to believe now but I had no intention of disparaging an entire legion of devoted Star Trek fans," he writes. "I mean, these are my people."

"Ultimately," says the author, "I feel guilty for relying on some tropes and stereotypes which are getting played out in our culture." He goes on to apologize to the many people who responded to the ad sincerely, offering to roleplay with the fictional author. "I wish I had a shuttlecraft and a bridge to show them," he opines. "Hell, I might even have donned a costume myself."

Thwarted Edmonton residents who are still hungering for a good fantasy may be in luck: One recent personals ad on the relatively low-traffic local Craiglist community is searching for a bona fide Nemesis.

Alas, there are no details on whether the part of Nemesis comes with a homemade lunch.

Photo via Craigslist

The night before he picked up a pistol and charged out into the middle of a Spokane Wash., street, Jacob I. Dorfman apparently sat down at his computer and penned a public Craigslist rant.

"I guess I’ll just start shooting whoever happens to be in the way," it read.

Anyone who read that should have been worried, if not terrified. Just two months ago a gunman murdered 26 people, including 20 children in Newtown, Conn. Instances of mass murder are no longer anomalous data points in America; they're coalescing into a deadly trend.

Only one person reported Dorfman's posting to the police.

The next day, shirtless and screaming, Dorfman fired off shots Adams Street and Eighth Avenue. Police rushed to the scene and shot him dead.

The chilling post has since been removed from Craigslist, but The Spokesman-Reviewdug up a copy.  

"I tried to live this life and ignore how cruel it can be. Though no matter it just seems useless. I bought a gun to shoot myself. But first I figured to kill someone else. What a shame to waste a life. I couldn’t decide who really needed to die. Should I shoot a criminal? Or is it time for a good guy to go? Oh hell, I guess I’ll just start shooting whoever happens to be in the way. Goodbye cruel world, goodbye, and when I’m down in the ground this sick world will keep going.”

Police aren't yet completely certain Dorfman wrote the message, which was posted to Craiglist's Rants and Raves section Monday at 4:15pm. They are investigating it.

The post was titled "Goodbye cruel world (Apt. 2)." Dorfman lived in an apartment 2—at 801 S. Adams St. in Spokane.

Dorfman had a long history of problems with the law. He spent from 2006 to 2010 behind bars for first-degree burglary, second-degree assault, and attempted robbery. In January, he was busted after driving the getaway car for two thieves stealing knives and a gun holster from a general store. He was too doped up on either meth or heroine to sign his own court documents that day, according to TheSpokesman-Review.

He was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday, Feb. 5—the same day he charged into the street and was shot down by police.

When Russ Mailloux spotted Dorfman's post three hours after it went live, he immediately called the police.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Mailloux told The Spokesman-Review. “I just knew that with all these mass killings that are going on, that if there was any chance this person was going to do that, the police had to be involved.”

Nineteen other people posted to the rants and raves section that day, three of whomposted about the nation's gun control debate. They were apparently too busy debating guns to notice somebody threatening real violence with one.

Photo via Spokesman-Review

Winter Storm Nemo is barreling down on the Northeast, ready to bury Boston and New York in feet of snow. While most people are preparing for the horrors of a three day weekend by tweeting about it ad nauseam, others have a better idea.

They're getting laid.

Search through the personals section on Craigslist and you'll find that Nemo is clearly the most powerful aphrodisiac to ever sweep down off the churning brine of the North Atlantic

So without further ado, here are a bunch of people in New York and Boston who could really use your help this weekend. 

This should probably go without saying when it comes to Craigslist personals, but some of these posts include NSFW images.

1) He has his own place

2) He'll even let you see his baby pictures

3) Compelling sales pitch

4) Reply "slave"

5) Snow boobs

6) Sub-zero watersports

7) Couch

8) Likes butts

9) Butt

Photo by Shanon Wise/Flickr

Supreme Court justices don’t have regular deadlines, the way ordinary workers do. So there’s no knowing when the court will announce its decision in the landmark Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case—could be tomorrow, could be months from now.
                                          
But since the case has the potential to outlaw pretty much the entire American secondhand market—no more buying or selling used books, clothing, furniture or electronics, no more yard sales and flea markets, no eBay or Craigslist—DemandProgress is collecting signatures on a petition“to urge the White House and Congress to support our right to resell the things we own.”

Of course, neither Congress nor the White House can give orders to the Supreme Court, but they can file a friend of the court brief arguing in favor of one side or other. DemandProgress, on its petition site YouveBeenOwned, explains what is at stake:

It's unreal. Any day now the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a decision in the case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons The Justices are currently debating whether you have the right to sell your stuff on eBay. Do you really own the smartphone or computer you’re using to read this? If you sold your books, would you be breaking the law? A federal court in New York says you would be, even if you legally paid for and bought them.

They’re not exaggerating. The Kirtsaeng case rests on the how to interpret the doctrine of “first sale.” Basically, copyright law states that copyright holders get paid at point of first sale – when you buy a brand-new copy of a Harry Potter book or movie, J.K. Rowling gets a cut. But you can sell your used copy or lend it out without getting Rowling’s permission or paying her anything.

However, textbook publisher John Wiley and Sons (best-known for publishing the “For Dummies” series) is arguing that first sale rights only apply to items made and sold in America—if your Harry Potter stuff comes from Thailand or any other foreign country, you should not be allowed to sell it without getting Rowling’s legal permission first.

Wiley sued Supap Kirtsaeng, a college student who bought inexpensive Wiley-produced textbooks in Thailand and re-sold them to bargain-hunting American college students. So far, two lower courts have sided with the publisher.

Along with the petition, DemandProgress also produced an animated video offering a two and a half minute summary explaining copyright law, first sale doctrine and the Kirtsaeng case.

After a title screen warns viewers “Don’t Get Owned,” the voiceover narrator asks “Have you ever resold a DVD … unloaded a smartphone, tablet or computer you didn’t need anymore? Or sold a house without researching where every faucet and pipe was manufactured? …. Two courts have already said that Americans don’t have a right to resell things they own if those things, or any part of them, were manufactured abroad.”
                                                                                                                  
Photo via MikeBlogs/Flickr

A sexy special education teacher in New York City is learning how not to coordinate an online hook-up after he used a school email account to peruse Craigslist's hookup section.

Matthew Maleski, who is an occupational therapist on the Upper East Side, was fired Thursday after more than a year on the job for using a shared school Gmail account to send risque photos of himself clad in nothing but boxers to other men.

The 32-year-old was outed by a coworker who reported his Craigslist postings to school officials in November 2012. The teacher told the principal that she had "discovered a number of inappropriate emails" in the Gmail account that Maleski used for class.

After changing the email's password, the unidentified female teacher expressed that she was upset since she created the account and her name was now associated with Maleski's lewd activities.

Maleski, who reportedly earned $57,000 a year, told the school he didn't intend to send emails from the email account. He added that the messages were sent on Sunday and Friday mornings from his mobile phone, which was linked to both his personal and professional email accounts.

The investigation concluded that he had "committed employee misconduct by sending inappropriate email communications from an email address that represents a [Department of Education] site."

His Facebook account, which has since been pulled, said he was an Ithaca College graduate.

Maleski's sultry past was doxxed by the New York Daily News, who discovered him gyrating in a video on YouTube called "I Just Wanna Fucking Dance!" for a San Francisco club. In the video, Maleski is seen dancing to house music practically naked underneath an orange light.

His shirtless pictures also allegedly appeared on ads for a gay mobile app called Hornet. Maleski appears with another shirtless man under the app's tagline of "Do we make your Hornet?"

Perhaps he should've just stuck to Grindr.

Photo via NYDN/Facebook