The real estate industry generates more than its share of copyright litigation. (It's remarkable, really.) Last week, I wrote about a home builder in Missouri who sued a couple of real estate agents for copyright infringement after they posted online, as part of real estate listings, floorplans of homes he had built.
Today, I write about a case brought by a photographer who makes his living licensing photos of houses to real estate brokers to illustrate listings. Brokers are members of multiple listing services ("MLS") - essentially, databases established by cooperating brokers to enable them to list their properties and see other properties for sale. The defendant operates Realtor.com, a website that aggregates and displays MLS real-estate listings using an IDX (Internet Data Exchange) feed. Brokers who subscribe to an MLS can upload information about homes for sale (including photos), and those listings are then uploaded...
