Zillow hit with federal copyright lawsuit over 47K allegedly stolen property photos

Real estate player CoStar, parent of Homes.com and Apartments.com, is suing Zillow, claiming the online real estate marketplace is using tens of thousands of its copyrighted photographs to prop up its business.

In court documents filed with the Southern District of New York this week, CoStar said it is trying to “redress Zillow’s widespread and systematic infringement of CoStar’s copyrighted photographs, which Zillow has unlawfully exploited to bolster its online rental listings business.” 

CoStar claimed in the June 30 filing that Zillow had displayed and profited off of nearly 47,000 CoStar-copyrighted images on Zillow.com and other Zillow sites, with many of the images even including the CoStar watermark. 

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In many cases, an image will appear on multiple different Zillow pages and different versions of listings, displaying over 250,000 times, according to the suit. 

“Zillow’s misconduct is not limited to the Zillow family of websites. Through lucrative syndication agreements, Zillow is also distributing CoStar’s images to its partnership network of listing websites, hosted by Zillow’s supposed competitors, Realtor.com and Redfin,” CoStar stated in the suit.

CoStar said in a release that it invested billions of dollars to create “the most comprehensive database of real estate information” including building what it describes as the “world’s largest library of real estate photographs.” 

The company said it has employed and hired thousands of professional photographers who have created millions of real estate images, which are owned and copyrighted by CoStar Group. 

FOX Business reached out to Zillow for comment. 

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This adds to the mounting legal challenges that Zillow is facing. This marks the second time within five weeks that Zillow has been hit with a lawsuit. The first came from real estate brokerage Compass, which filed a 60-page complaint in Manhattan federal court, claiming that Zillow is improperly refusing to list homes on its site that were first listed elsewhere.

Compass, based in Manhattan, is seeking an injunction against Zillow to force them to change their practices, as well as monetary damages.

Seattle-based Zillow has about 160 million homes in its database, receives 227 million unique visitors a month and received 2.4 billion visits between January and March, according to Reuters. They called Compass’ claims “unfounded” and told FOX Business that it “will vigorously defend against them.”

FOX Business’ Pilar Arias contributed to this report.