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Zillow Drops Complaint Against Blogger After Backlash Over Copyright Claim (geekwire.com)
The blog "McMansion Hell" is back up and running days after Zillow threatened the site's creator, Kate Wagner, into taking it down. Zillow's decision to withdraw their complaint came soon after the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced it would defend Wagner pro bono. GeekWire reports: "We have decided not to pursue any legal action against Kate Wagner and McMansion Hell," a statement from the company said Thursday. "We've had a lot of conversations about this, including with attorneys from the EFF, whose advocacy and work we respect. EFF has stated that McMansion Hell won't use photos from Zillow moving forward. It was never our intent for McMansion Hell to shut down, or for this to appear as an attack on Kate's freedom of expression. We acted out of an abundance of caution to protect our partners -- the agents and brokers who entrust us to display photos of their clients' homes."
The Zillow response came in the wake of the week's events and a strongly worded letter to Zillow general counsel Brad Owens on Thursday (PDF here). EFF staff attorney Daniel Nazer said, "Our client has no obligation to, and thus will not, comply with Zillow's demands. Zillow's legal threats are not supported and plainly seek to interfere with protected speech." EFF said McMansion Hell was relaunching and no posts would be deleted, but that "in the interests of compromise, and because Wagner no longer wishes to use Zillow's website, she will no longer source photographs from Zillow for her blog."
The Zillow response came in the wake of the week's events and a strongly worded letter to Zillow general counsel Brad Owens on Thursday (PDF here). EFF staff attorney Daniel Nazer said, "Our client has no obligation to, and thus will not, comply with Zillow's demands. Zillow's legal threats are not supported and plainly seek to interfere with protected speech." EFF said McMansion Hell was relaunching and no posts would be deleted, but that "in the interests of compromise, and because Wagner no longer wishes to use Zillow's website, she will no longer source photographs from Zillow for her blog."
"blogger agrees to stop unlawfully using copyrighted images without license"
As Zillow does not own the copyright to the images, it would have no standing to bring a copyright case and it could not itself offer a license.
Blogger was not using copyrighted images unlawfully; the use was protected free speech.
The headline here is click bait. A perfectly accurate headline would be "blogger agrees to stop unlawfully using copyrighted images without license".
No, it wouldn't, because what actually happened is that the entire archive of posts she's made using pictures from Zillow will REMAIN ONLINE -- only new posts going forward will source the images from elsewhere. Zillow did not want to allow her to do this.
So, this woman is a total bitch who takes photos of their homes people list on Zillow and use them to make fun of the home owners because she personally finds large cookie cutter homes tasteless.
Kate Wagner is an architecture graduate student who teaches about good architecture partly by critiquing and parodying bad architecture. (And partly by publishing essays about the history of architecture and design.)
There needs to be a lot more of this in other fields of study. You can't learn about good stuff just by looking at the good stuff. Every programmer knows this: You learn so much about good programming by having to maintain shitty code.
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