By: Davis Rowley (President of the Residential Association of Realtors)
Pirate. It's a romantic word, one that conjures up images of adventure and excitement, of the high seas, sword-fighting and grand ships. Of course, the reality of piracy was not so romantic for its victims. Those unfortunate enough to see their boats boarded by pirates experienced intimidation and sometimes even death. And theft, of course.
In today's world, Bluebeard and Long John Silver no longer exist. But piracy still lives. And at its most basic, piracy is all about theft. It is about injustice, about stealing the fruits of someone else's labor and reaping the benefits from it.
Today, the real estate industry has little protection against modern pirates, the kind who use the internet to steal information and then disseminate or sell it as their own, according to the Greater Boston Real Estate Board's Residential Association of Realtors®.
The lifeblood of the real estate industry is the multiple listing service or MLS, Real estate professionals compile and use the listings contained in the MLS every day in their course of business. It is through an MLS that a family searching for a home can find listings of dozens of homes in the neighborhood with a specific style and range of price of their choosing. Each MLS listing also includes information on a broker, usually the person who wrote the listing. The listing that entices the prospective buyer represents the "sweat of the brow" of the real estate professional who seeks to link a home seller with a home buyer. There are more than 900 MLS's nationwide that provide information on homes for sale and now many of the MLS's have listings on the internet. Unfortunately, it is easy for unscrupulous persons to copy material from a web site and present it as his or her own. The act of piracy can harm the real estate industry as consumers.
For example, an MLS may sell advertising on its web site. These advertisers might include moving companies, mortgage brokers, home inspectors and the like. A data pirate who copies the MLS property listings to his own site, removes the advertising and then sells the listings as his own causes a loss to the MLS.
Similarly, the pirate could remove the broker information from the listing and then demand a commission from the listing broker as a buyer's agent. In addition, a pirate who steals MLS property listings has no responsibility toward the home seller. While a Realtor might receive instructions from the home seller not to release the address other than to schedule appointments to show the property, a pirate would not need to comply with that request. The seller then might be subjected to various sales calls.
Regrettably, current copyright law may not continue to provide protection against these pirates. Congress has before it legislation that could provide a strong remedy against this problem - The Collections of Information Antipiracy Act (H.R.354), co-sponsored by Reps. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) and Howard L. Berman (D-Cal.). Coble is the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property. That subcommittee and the full Judiciary Committee recently approved the antipiracy act, meaning it could go before the full House of Representatives for a vote.
There is a competing bill (H.R. 1858) that has been passed by the House Commerce Committee. This bill would provide no better protection for real estate listings than current copyright law. The Coble/Berman antipiracy act would provide clear, fair protection against pirates who would copy information and harm the information producer's market. It would do so by retaining the "fair use doctrine" of copyright law, while allowing for public, educational, research and non-profit uses of online data collections.
The Commerce Committee's bill would provide no new protections. In fact, it would punish data pirates only when they duplicate virtually an entire database. The National Association of Realtors, opposes this approach as an inadequate protection against database thieves. The Greater Boston Real Estate Board's Residential Association of Realtors stands with NAR on this issue.
NAR is not alone in fighting for enactment of the Coble/Berman antipiracy act. NAR is joined in urging Congress to approve this bill by the American Medical Association, the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., the New York Stock Exchange, the Newsletter Publishers Association, the Newspaper Association of America, and several publishing houses, including McGraw-Hill and Thomas Publishing Co.
The current environment of online commerce has often been compared to the Wild West. Given the vast amount of information provided and exchanged through the Internet, it has become critical to have a clear understanding of what constitutes protected intellectual property under federal law. Congress needs to approve the Coble/Berman antipiracy act to protect business and consumers alike.