Real estate listings website and sharing platform RealMassive is denying it infringed on CoStar Realty’s copyright by using photos that still bear the research site’s watermark.
The Austin-based startup responded late last week to a May 22 lawsuit which claimed that the company had engaged in a “systematic theft and improper use of CoStar’s copyrighted photographs of commercial properties,” according to the Austin Business Journal.
In the response, RealMassive claims that the pictures with the watermark were removed from the site and that CoStar had exaggerated the misuse of the pictures, which only represented a small portion of the site’s data base, according to the news outlet.
The suit filed by CoStar Realty, a subsidiary of real estate research giant CoStar Group, claimed also that RealMassive “prominently displays CoStar-copyrighted photographs, including those still bearing the CoStar logo and watermark.”
Last year, CoStar was involved in a similar suit when it claimed that some of CompStak’s users had shared and published CoStar’s proprietary data. [Austin Business Journal] — Claire Moses