McMansion Hell Blog in Legal Hot Water with Real Estate Site Zillow

It's been a mixed bag for viral sensation McMansion Hell. The same day as a feature video by The Washington Post, the news broke that the website is facing potential legal charges from real estate site Zillow. 1

“I've never received any warning from them before this,” Wagner tells The Verge. “This blog is my entire livelihood and I am at risk of losing everything.” Wagner currently monetizes from McMansion Hell by selling merchandise with original artwork referencing the blog and accepting Patreon donations. She is also working to turn the blog into an e-book, where she had planned to pay to license photographs used in the project.

At time of publish, Wagner has temporarily taken McMansionHell.com down. Somewhat ironically, Zillow was just involved in its own legal battle over copyrighted content, where the real estate site was found guilty of copyright infringement on more than 28,000 photos and ordered to pay about $4.1 million in total damages.

“Zillow has a legal obligation to honor the agreements we make with our listing providers about how photos can be used,” Zillow tells The Verge in a statement. “We are asking this blogger to take down the photos that are protected by copyright rules, but we did not demand she shut down her blog and hope she can find a way to continue her work.”2

The irreverent architecture criticism blog McMansion Hell has gone offline after its creator, Kate Wagner, received a cease-and-desist letter yesterday from online real estate database Zillow. In the letter, which Wagner posted on Twitter, a lawyer for Zillow accuses her of violating the site’s terms of use by “reproducing, modifying, distributing, or otherwise creating derivative works from any portion of the Zillow Site.”

Many of the images featured on McMansion Hell, which Wagner augments with clever and derisory commentary about the architectural excesses of suburban design, are sourced from Zillow. In its letter, the lawyer for the real estate listings aggregator alleges that Wagner’s site “may violate the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state laws prohibiting fraud and interference with Zillow’s business expectations,” implying that Wagner’s blog is having a detrimental effect on Zillow’s business.

“No, we don’t own the photos,” Emily Heffter, a PR person for Zillow, told The Verge. “We can’t give away what is not ours. It is our legal responsibility to those partners to enforce the contracts we have with them.”