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New front in old battle to protect listing photos

New front in old battle to protect listing photos

by DeVore Design, August 14, 2015

The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) is taking the real estate industry’s battle against the unauthorized use of real estate listing data to a new front: the U.S. Copyright Office. The office wants to modernize the rules, and NAR provided a detailed list of recommendations that, among other things, would help the real estate industry fight people who scrape listing photos off industry websites for their own use.

Listing photos make a tempting target because they’re central to listings. In fact, they’re what consumers look for the most when they shop for a home, according to NAR research.

Not a simple problem

Copyright ownership and licensing of listing photos is often complicated. Different people can own listing photographs in different ways, and the rights in the photos can extend to more than just one person – the listing agent, the broker, the MLS, the photographer and so on.

Because of the often-complicated image authorship rights, NAR asked the Copyright Office to make it easier for owners to register their listing photos for protection.

One way to do that is simply ease application requirements. For example, owners could file applications for large groups of photographs, and NAR suggests making it unnecessary to list all authors in such a group. That would make it simpler for photos to get registered, which in turn would make it easier to enforce copyright rules.

Enforcement would also be easier if the right to go after someone for unauthorized scraping is extended to non-exclusive licensees of the photo – one of the people who has permission to use it.

NAR submitted additional recommendations to the Copyright Office. The next step is for the agency to review all the input from individuals and groups around the country, and release a proposal for further comments.