CoStar claims Zillow systematically used copyrighted photos

Player Costar, Parent of Homes.com and Apartments.com, prosecute Zillow, claiming that the online real estate market uses tens of thousands of its copyrights to support its business.

In the documents of the court brought to the southern province in New York this week, Costar said it was trying to “compensate for the wide and regular violation of Costar’s photographic materials, which Zillow exploited illegally to enhance online rental lists.”

Costar claimed in the June 30 file that Zillow has been displayed and benefited from nearly 47,000 photos from Costar-Copyright on Zillow.com and other Zillow sites, with many pictures even including Costar Watermark.

Real estate company sucking Zillow over the right of consumers to choose “

In many cases, the image will appear on several different Zillow pages and different versions of the menus, which display more than 250,000 times, according to the suit.

“Zillow’s misconduct is not limited to the Zillow family from web sites. Through profitable participation agreements, Zillow also distributes Costar photos to its partnership network of the required web sites, which is hosted by the supposed Zillow competitors, Reallyor.com and RedFin,”

Costar said in a statement that she had invested billions of dollars to create a “more comprehensive database of real estate information”, including building what it describes as “the largest real estate photo library in the world.”

The company said it had used and rented thousands of professional photographers who created millions of real estate photos, which it owned and copyright by the Costar collection.

Fox Business connects to Zillow to comment.

Zillow app on GERMANTOWN, New York, on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. (Gabby Jones / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

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This adds to the escalating legal challenges facing Zillow. This represents the second time within five weeks that Zillow was exposed to with a lawsuit. The first came from Compass Compass, which filed a 60 -page complaint at the Manhattan Federal Court, claiming that Zillow is incorrectly refusing to include homes on its site and which was first inserted elsewhere.

Compass, based in Manhattan, seeks a judicial order against Zillow to force them to change their practices, as well as cash damage.

This image displays the Zillow website, which is reflected in the logo of the Zillow application in Washington, DC, on February 15, 2023. (Stephanie Reynolds / AFP / Getty Images)

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Seattle -based Zillow owns about 160 million homes in its database, receiving 227 million unique visitors per month and receiving 2.4 billion visits between January and March, according to Reuters. They called Kompass’s “baseless” claims and told Fox that it would “defend strongly against them.”

Pilar Arias contributed to Fox Business in this report.