Your Listing Data Is Copyrighted. Start Acting Like It.
Nobody disputes that the raw facts of a transaction are not copyrightable. A house exists at an address. It sold for a price on a date. Those are facts, and facts belong to everyone. But an MLS listing is not a pile of facts. It is a curated work. An agent writes a property description that frames the home, chooses which features to emphasize, and crafts language designed to attract buyers. A photographer composes shots, selects angles, edits for light. The MLS compiles all of this into an organized database with fields, taxonomies, and search structures that took decades to build. That is editorial labor, the same kind of labor the court protected in Westlaw's headnotes.











