James Skyles

Real estate data firm CoStar and real estate digital marketplace CREXi are currently engaged in a high-profile intellectual property fight. Costar, which runs Apartments.com, alleges that CREXi is violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using its images on Crexi.com without regard to its terms of service. The company has gone so far as to say that “CREXi is attempting to build its own online commercial real estate marketplace and auction platform by free-riding on CoStar’s billions of dollars of investments and the thirty-plus years of hard work by CoStar’s employees.” CrEXi, on the other hand, argues that all the images on the site are uploaded at brokers’ (not CrEXi’s) direction and thus the company can’t be held liable for IP violations. 

As IPWatchdog reported last week, on March 2, in what can only be characterized as the most significant crackdown against patent evasion in a generation, TiVo Corporation won a groundbreaking U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling against Comcast. The Court’s opinion provides a noteworthy precedent that will spell trouble for the future of Comcast’s business practices, particularly for the company’s upcoming cases with the ITC. More significantly, however, it will protect the authority of the ITC to police similarly profiled instances of patent trolling in the future, which will make the opinion go down in history as one of the most substantial victories for the strength and sanctity of patent evasion in the 21st century