Zillow, AKA the umbrella company that owns almost every real estate website you go to, is being sued by the Real Estate information website/company CoStar for illegally posting a whopping 46,000 images owned by CoStar. In a unique move, that definitely doesn’t come off as an obvious omission of guilt, Zillow sent emails to subsidiary sites it owns telling them that the photos were being removed. So here’s the rub — if you accidentally do it, sure, you have some defense. But when it is 46,000 images AND, as CoStar notes in their suit, the watermarks have been cropped out of the images purposefully, and you send out rushed emails announcing you are going to try to get rid of the digital evidence as soon as you can, you run into some problems. And Zillow is not some Joe Schmoe small business hustling to get its foot in the door of an industry and thus cutting corners to save money, Zillow is the behemoth of online Real Estate sites. What about Street Easy?!? Oh, yeah, Zillow owns them.
We rate this 5 full slaps for not needing to do the piracy, clearly doing it, AND trying to cover it up sloppily.
PS Gen AI Art with prompt, “Create a psychedelic image of an imaginative conception of the word ‘”‘behemoth'”‘ as a mythical beast, and a real estate agent as the hero of our story standing up to it in a dungeons and dragons like battle.” brought to you by “ChatGPT still always defaulting to a white guy. Hmmm, no systemic racism on display here. Just, uh, pretend the bias isn’t out in the open.”
