At its launch on August 25, Zoocasa.com produced a gag listing of the Rogers Centre in Toronto to show off the site’s features. Century 21 Canada says it wants it to remove its data from the site.
By Kathy Bevan
Century 21 Canada has filed a lawsuit against real estate aggregator website Zoocasa.com, asking the court to prevent it from carrying Century 21 Canada listings data.
The Statement of Claim was originally filed against Zoocasa and its owner Rogers Communications in December 2008, when Zoocasa.com was operating in beta mode. The site officially launched on August 25.
In its claim, the Century 21 plaintiffs accuse Zoocasa.com and Rogers Communications of copyright infringement, stating the aggregator website is “scraping” data from the Century 21 Canada website and reproducing that data on Zoocasa.com without consent. In addition, the plaintiffs accuse Zoocasa.com of posting unauthorized hyperlinks to the Century 21 Canada website.
The claim says Century 21 Canada includes language from the “Terms of Use” on its website, which state that all of its website users must agree to “a binding contract with Century 21 Canada”. Restrictions within those Terms of Use include the directive that users must not “frame in another website, post on another website, or otherwise use the content for any public, commercial or non-personal use…The prohibited uses expressly include but are not limited to ‘screen scraping’, ‘database scraping’ and any other activity intended to collect, store, re-organize, summarize or manipulate any content…”
Century 21 Canada is asking the court to set up a permanent injunction against Zoocasa.com to prevent it from posting data from the Century 21 Canada website, and is asking to be compensed for damages as well as for any profits Zoocasa.com and Rogers have acquired as a result of posting the Century 21 Canada data.
When Zoocasa.com launched, the syndication service said it would be “the Realtors’ best friend”, working in tandem with the real estate industry in Canada. General manager Butch Langlois described Zoocasa.com as an aggregator of property listings from public sites, partnerships with other companies and direct “grass roots” contact with real estate agents and brokers. He also said the company was approaching real estate boards across the country to make a deal for their listings.
Regarding the Century 21 Canada lawsuit, Zoocasa.com executive Saul Colt (whose title is “head of magic”) told REM they are preparing their defence.
“We have tried several times to sit down with Century 21 – even offering to come meet with them on their own turf – to discuss their issues, as we feel this whole situation can be cleared up with a discussion,” says Colt. “As of now all requests have been ignored.”
But Century 21 president and COO Don Lawby says that what he wants is the immediate removal of Century 21 Canada data from the Zoocasa.com website.
“We’ve spent millions of dollars and untold hours of effort to comply with the requirements of the majority of real estate boards across Canada – which are all different – to be able…to go get those listings from the board, post them on our site and then have salespeople augment those listings with additional information, data and digital images,” says Lawby. “And somebody comes along, with no effort, does not have to go out and talk to agents all across this country or talk to brokers and solicit the data…and they just take the data? I just don’t think it’s right.”
Lawby says he expects the court case to go into discoveries this fall, and that his company will take the lawsuit as far as they need to go. “Or Zoocasa.com could decide tomorrow to only put content on their site that they’re provided with,” he says.
