The news in CRE circles recently has been about CoStar suing several individuals and companies as well as asking to unmask several John Doe defendants (or if you’d like a link from CoStar go here) that it accuses of data theft and digital piracy. This is a sexy story in the normally calm, tranquil world of CRE (maybe calm and tranquil aren’t the right adjectives but you get what I’m saying). The primary direction of the suit was in asking CompStak to reveal several users responsible for allegedly taking data from the CoStar database and putting it into CompStak’s.
You may wonder how CoStar could possibly know that they were the source because a lease is a factual document that says what it says. Anyone with access to the lease could put that data in any variety of databases. This is where it gets fun. Apparently CoStar has seeded their database with false data so that they can detect precisely this kind of situation. It’s no different than creating unique versions of confidential documents that have different words misspelled throughout so that you can tell whose version each copy is.
Fortunately CoStar is going after bad users instead of competing companies. But this does seem to start them down an aggressive litigation path that could see them suing competing organizations. It’s a path we’ve seen in technology companies (looking at you Microsoft circa 2010) which gave rise to the phrase “if you can’t innovate, litigate.” While CoStar has 6 patents that I found (all received between 2005 and 2009 – 4 which they list on their website) they currently are not going that route.
It’s been interesting reading the news about this case in the various CRE circles as all of the reporting and blogging has been aggressively neutral. Take this post from Llenrock titled Napster, Revisited. Llenrock believes that CoStar is acting in their own self interest but also says that nothing will change from this. Users will continue doing what they do. They also call out piracy as bad but also stands up for the value of data and data quality. No strong-sided defense of CoStar but also no bashing of the alleged pirates. This is much more civil discourse than occurs in other industries.
What I’m taking away from all of this is that CRE is currently in a state where everyone understands where we are. We are in a data heavy industry and there is going to be more competition for high quality data. But we also have the experience of seeing what has happened in Technology, Movies, Music and Books to see where the rabbit hole goes.
Hopefully it’s clear but in case it isn’t, I do believe that companies have a right and responsibility to protect what is truly theirs. The line becomes in defining “what is truly theirs.” Simply collecting public information into a database does not suddenly make data private or protected. Similarly, just because the data is public users do not have the right to share their user rights to the service with others. The collection of data is a service that comes with certain restrictions on access.
David – Interesting fact that they “seeded their database with false data”. Inspires confidence knowing they knowing CoStar lied to its users. Sounds like the grounds for a law suit by innocent subsrcribers harmed by the use of false data. Certainly, the public trust has been broken. Great sales slogan “CoStar the best false data in the country”. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the comment, David! Not sure that their seeding is actually impacting the data quality or stretches to the point of lying. It’s one of those standard practices for a lot of proprietary data sets to find out when it leaks. However, it is something that should be watched in case actual critical information is being adjusted by large enough amounts.