Written by Nathan Thomas on July 1, 2004
Written by Nathan Thomas on July 1, 2004
Homestore®, owns, or has, licensed trademark rights to the words REALTOR®, REALTOR.com® and operates the REALTOR.com® website. Homestore® maintains that it owns the factual information you upload to the REALTOR.com® site, and not you. Accordingly, we have been told to cease and desist allowing you to enter your listings' MLS number and display your REALTOR.com® listing on your Agent XSite for your prospective buyers. Homestore® requires instead that if you upload your listings to REALTOR.com®, that they be displayed in proximity to your competition's listings on the REALTOR.com® site, and nowhere else.
We are mindful of the impact this is sure to have on your business. It is important to note that you will still be able to add your listings to your Agent XSite, but the feature allowing you to pull the information and pictures you have uploaded to REALTOR.com® already will be disabled on July 8, Homestore's® deadline for compliance. To display the factual information about your properties for sale on your personal website, away from your competitors', you will need to manually enter the information into your XSite wizard.
We have lead the fight against companies aggregating data and selling its re-use in the appraisal arena for years, and have no different opinion of the action of Homestore®. Facts are not copyrightable. The United States Supreme Court has said so. And in the words of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place."
We believe they're your listings, factual information about properties you have for sale, and that you smartly invest in a personal website so that your properties need not be lumped in with competitors' offerings. We are complying with the cease and desist order of Homestore®, but are evaluating our legal alternatives going forward.
In many arenas - insurance risk management, property valuation, health care, too many to name - there is a ton of money to be made by the company that can muscle its way into a monopoly over data. But data are facts. You can't claim ownership of a fact. Doing so is specious, and only works if you have the muscle and arrogance to be a bully - and you, the agent, are the ones to suffer by Homestore's bullying.