Legal Dept.

Craigslist legal case could form a potentially enormous precedent

A complaint brought by a group of fair housing advocates against the free-for-all housing ads posted at the hugely popular classified ad site could spell the end of free internet ads

by matt goody

Although it received little attention on this side of the border, a suit being brought against the online forum Craigslist.org in Chicago is garnering a lot of attention in the US. While the suit is focused on the company’s Chicago website, the result of the case could have a major influence beyond deciding how the company conducts business. In particular, the case is likely to have a major bearing on local newspapers around the world, from the Vancouver Sun to the Sydney Morning Herald, who have suffered tremendously at the hands of sites like craigslist.org that offer free classified listings.

Craigslist is an enormous online forum which in recent years has become one of the most popular sites on the web. The site essentially operates as a web version of the local newspaper’s classifieds section, except that it allows users to post housing and sale notices without any fee or regulations (the site charges for job postings to make its money). The company has only a bare-bones staff of 19 employees, and thus users create and monitor most of the content on the site. Craigslist provides a flagging system that in theory allows users to delete any postings that are deemed illegal, inappropriate or false.

The issue at hand in Chicago is a suit brought against Craigslist by a fair housing association asserting that the housing postings on the website violate the 1968 Fare Housing Act (which makes it illegal to print or publish discriminatory housing ads). The fair housing association has listed over one hundred ads posted over a six-month period that it says discriminate against citizens based on race, religion and gender. Examples provided by the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and reprinted in a New York Times article by Adam Liptak, include Craigslist users looking for a roommate who is a “clean Godly Christian male,” and another wishing to avoid “African Americans and Arabians [because they] tend to clash with me.”

The fair housing groups wants the website to institute a manual review system operated by staff similar to the systems required by all print newspapers when printing classified ads. On Craiglist’s Chicago website, the company’s CEO Jim Buckmaster asserts that these demands “cease treating our users with trust and respect, and instead impose inappropriate, mistake-prone, and generally counter-productive centralized controls.” Craiglists is also obviously against the changes because it would likely force the company to increase operating expenses to address the issue, which would in turn force them to pass the expense onto users accustomed to free services.

At the heart of this case is the assertion by Craiglist that it is not a newspaper, and should not fall under the same guidelines required of a traditional fish-wrap. Civil rights issues are clashing with cyber rights issues, and the Fair Housing Act of ’68 is coming up against the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which for years has shielded sites like Craiglists on issues of discriminatory content. Furthermore, if the Chicago court rules that the company must regulate users’ postings, it will be a major coup for local newspapers (who have been losing ground to the web for years) because it might force Craiglist to charge for postings. According to Julie Bosman in the New York Times, online classified ads increased 80 percent last year, with over 26.3 million users, and almost nine million of those users post to Craigslist. While it is unlikely that this trend will decrease no matter which way this case turns out, a ruling against Craigslist which forces service charges will level the playing field for traditional papers that have moved their classifieds onto their websites.

Ultimately, if the website is forced to alter their posting policy, the real losers in this case will be the users of Craigslist, many of whom are poor and utilize the free services available on the site. Buckmaster pokes a serious hole in the argument of the housing association when he argues in his statement that a ruling in favor of the housing organization would reduce “access to equal opportunity housing, by undercutting our fundamental free speech rights, and by intruding on important privacy rights—thereby doing a great disservice to the very persons these lawyers purport to represent.”

Yet, if Craigslist and other online forums want to compete with traditional papers in attracting people who wish to post housing ads, authorities and paper owners argue that there should be standard rules that apply across the board. While some argue that this case marks the end of the uninhibited days of the Internet, with literally thousands of house ads being posted on the internet each week on various sites, the likelihood of effective standards being established for postings is highly unlikely whether there’s a legal precedent or not.