by Grant Wakelin
List your property for sale and you could be accused of theft. Here’s how.
You want to sell your home and have decided to do it yourself. Bouncing around TradeMe you see the QV advert for property information. You click on it and order one of their reports, or you do the same on Zoodle. You use the information you purchased (land area, building area, rates, school zones etc), add some personal details yourself, fill out the listing, load the photos and publish it on TradeMe. Happens every day. All good, right?
Nope. You are in breach of the terms and conditions of use of the data you purchased. The argument - you have stolen their data by using it in a manner that was not authorised. To summarise their terms somewhat, you can look at the data but you can’t use it. Yes, you have bought it, but can only use it in the manner they allow and those terms are normally very restrictive.
Specifically (from Zoodle), you must not use, copy, upload the data to a third party site (7.3.b), see at right:
The PropertyIQ terms (as part of the Zoodle terms and conditions), you must not further disseminate the data or publish it (2.2.5 and 2.2.6), below:
By using the data on your Trademe listing you are doing just that, using the information on a third party website. Even though it is data about your property that you purchased in a report (and actually originally paid through your rates to have developed).
And the data companies are aggressive about it too. Here is the Zoodle site with the use notice front and centre of the homepage (probably a good example of what happens when lawyers start running websites actually):
However, it would be interesting to see how enforceable these terms are. Pretty much every real estate agency in NZ would be in breach of these license terms and the data suppliers don’t seem to do much about it. You regularly see this sort of disclaimer in property descriptions these days:
Meaning, of course, they have republished the data on third party websites.
Now, you are not going to go to jail for mis-using some data. But this is a very practical example of the importance of Open Data and why we continue to push hard for council data to be open and available for regular use, enhancement and development. When key data such as council information is controlled its everyday practical use can be restricted and prevented in ways never intended.
There is a solution available for Wellington people of course - www.watchmystreet.co.nz We developed that site as an example of what can be done for ratepayers when the data is available - we’d love to provide the capability to other towns and cities around New Zealand. The only way for that to happen is for councils to break the stranglehold of the data companies and make the data available the way Wellington City Council has. Add your voice to that movement here.
Back to the opening example, I suspect that if you did get a letter about misappropriating the data, you would probably lob an immediate call into TradeMe for inducing you to purchase and use the data in breach of the license terms! Let the big boys fight it out.
Oh, and by the way, I am certain my use of the data websites above was for personal purposes. Just in case any lawyer has an itchy pen.....
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