Real estate listing firm Zillow Group and photography firm VHT have been locked in a huge copyright lawsuit over Zillow's alleged infringement of thousands of VHT's real estate images for years now, and it doesn't look like it's going to end any time soon.

VHT originally filed the suit against Zillow Group in 2015, alleging that tens of thousands of its images were used without permission on both the Zillow. com website and Zillow Digs. Though the claims regarding Zillow. com were dismissed last year, the legal matter has persisted over alleged infringement on Zillow Digs.

This past February, VHT was awarded $8. 24 million in statutory damages and $79,875 in actual damages by a jury over copyrighted images that appeared without authorization on Zillow Digs. The matter took another turn last month, however, when a judge slashed that figure in half, citing lack of evidence to prove that most of the 28,000+ images were ever viewed by users.

Following that, both VHT and Zillow Group petitioned the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week in an effort to have the lower court's ruling overturned. The case remains ongoing.

This isn't the first legal row Zillow has been involved in over image copyright issues. The company was recently in the news over legal threats it issued against blogger Kate Wagner of 'McMansion Hell' over her use of photos reportedly sourced in part from Zillow's website. It was soon revealed that Zillow did not own the copyrights to those images, but was instead attempting to enforce third-party contracts to which Wagner was not a party. The company publicly stated that it would not pursue legal actions against Wagner over what her attorneys called fair use of the images.

2017-7-21 21:14