Critics worry bills would interfere with sharing of real estate data
BY PAUL HAGEY, Edited by Greg Wilson (The REI Mentor - http://www.reimentor.com), WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2012.
Some real estate practitioners and technologists have taken a stance against federal anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives (SOPA) and the Senate (PIPA), worried that it could restrict the legitimate sharing of real estate information online.
The legislation, say critics, could allow authorities to shut down websites, deemed to infringe upon copyrights, with no due process, while proponents of the bills say that the legislation would streamline and strengthen copyright holders' creations.
Think of all the shared information: multiple listing services, photos, videos. Can you verify the copyrights of all the content? One unknown copyright infringement, like finding a needle in a sky-high haystack, could mean your whole site being removed, blocked, if this legislation passes, critics say.
Dr. Jim Gaines, a researcher at Texas A&M's Real Estate Center, said that this legislation could have severe ramifications for the real estate industry. He mentioned possible data-sharing restrictions, like multiple listing service info on Craigslist, as an example.
Broker Eric Post, principal of Portland, Ore.-based Happy Valley Real Estate, said, "The real estate industry is a collaborative industry." "We thrive on the ability to share listings, photos, information," he said. "Any threat like this is a threat to our industry."
"The ability to take down entire websites is pretty scary," said Post. "The online economy is so important to us, we need to protect it."
Being ultimately responsible for every minutiae of copyrighted content on your website would not only be impossible, wrote Eric Stegemann, a writer at Tribus.com in a blog post, but is unreasonable:
"For one photo on one listing, your entire site could be filtered right off the Internet. No more SEO (search engine optimization). No more leads, no more branding. For one photo, out of the 100,000 listings your MLS may have, with five photos each. One in 500,000 -- yes."
"Let's say I'm taking a video of a listing; there could be copyrighted photographs on the wall that could lead to my site being removed," said Thompson, if the legislation passed.
