In the brave new world of information technology, real estate professionals would serve their profession well by boning up on copyright protection law.

Members of the realty industry, primarily real estate agents, who were asked to remove copyright protected editorial content from their websites or blogs typically did so, but often only after claiming ignorance, a position which is not legally defensible.

As the saying goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

A smaller number of real estate professionals out right refused to return stolen published goods and sometimes become indignant, belligerent, even possessive of work legally belonging to someone else.

No matter the reaction, copyright violations -- the theft of intellectual property -- is a federal crime, and potentially a felony when repeated. It's policed by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Not long after the advent of the Internet, the FBI set up a cyber crime unit specifically to address how the Internet inherently made pilfering everything from the written word to CD tracks as easy as clicking a mouse.

Today, cyber criminals also find the Net easy pickings when it comes to fingering major motion pictures and other video content, but the FBI is on the case.

According to an Associated Press dispatch this week, Google Inc. recently set aside more than $200 million in its recent acquisition of YouTube Inc. to cover possible losses from potential suits stemming from the large number of pirated videos posted on the newly acquired, successful video-sharing site.

Copyright violations likely pandemic

The habit of snatching copyrighted editorial content from one Web site and posting it on another, fully unedited, uncut and without license, purchase or permission, is likewise criminal behavior and it has reached alarming proportions in the real estate industry.

Copyright infringement is likely pandemic, reaching well into other industries, but the real estate industry has a particular penchant for editorial content -- information. Editorial content sells well in the real estate world where informed consumers make for clients who are much easier to serve than less informed or uninformed clients.

The currency of good, useful knowledge that really hits home is what pays buyers and sellers to visit realty websites and blogs when they aren't buying and selling -- which is most of the time.

A smart real estate agent knows a captive audience requires less farming.

Unfortunately, the desire to present a blog or website as the most user informative is driving some real estate professionals to cheat.

A real estate writer who regularly polices the Internet for copyright violations of his work, searched a single blog service provider, Google's popular Blogger.com, for incidents of his byline and received 402 hits. Virtually every hit was a real estate industry blog, not surprisingly.

What was surprising was that after spending hours painstakingly examining the first 100 incidents, the writer found more than three in 10 of the blogs had lifted not only his but other authors' articles completely from their approved publishing site and placed it on their company blog.

The vast majority of the 100 bloggers also lifted and published the true publisher's copyright mark, as if they had permission to do so.

In his unscientific research, the real estate writer emailed the first 25 bloggers about the purloined editorial content asking them to remove the articles or prove they had been licensed to use it.

Again, most complied, removed the editorial content, claimed they didn't know it was illegal and apologized.

Ignorance of copyright law is not uncommon.

A major ongoing class action copyright protection lawsuit filed by writers' groups and freelance writers against a group of prominent publishers would indicate even well known purveyors of the written word, use their own interpretation of the copyright law.

Ignorance of the law no excuse

Most professionals, however, should know better. Trade groups frown on the practice.

The National Association of Realtors ethics code, for example, which members are supposed to adhere to, clearly advises, "NAR encourages its members to respect others' intellectual property rights just as we ask others to respect ours," according to a spokesman.

That's because editorial content crookery is not unlike one website framing or otherwise publishing listings it obtained, without rights, from the legal owner -- a matter that has raised the legal hackles of real estate trade groups again and again, sometimes in courts of law.

It's a crime.

A copyright violation is a theft of someone else's property, just as are the crimes of pick pocketing, shoplifting, car jacking, burglary or bank robbery.

It's a crime not unlike a real estate agent taking a listing, marketing the property, selling it and then collecting the commission only to have another agent in the office come by and swipe the check off his desk.

Copyright laws simply apply to a different kind of service or product. It's called intellectual property.

"Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (Title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of 'original works of authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works," according to the U.S. Copyright Office.

"Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright."

The law is clear, but some of the reasons real estate professionals give for porting copyright-protected editorial content to their blogs are startling, given professionals are bound by a code of ethical, law-abiding behavior.

Some expect gratitude.

"You could thank me for posting your piece, and of course, properly attributing to you ... but then that's your choice," said one.

Others do it because, well, they can.

"Please provide proof of ownership of listed article," demanded another, who had already illegally published the article with the writer's name clearly attached.

Still others give crassly contradictory statements.

"I have given credit to you in my blog but am unwilling to pay you to give you credit for your article. Frankly, it's not worth anything to me," wrote an agent who works for a company with a name that specifically means "quality of being honest and having strong moral principles".

"The information in your article is public information and I am a fair to competent writer myself," he railed on.

And then there are the justifications.

"I have people steal loans form me all of the time. They do it by shopping for the lowest rate or fee, even after I've been working with them for a while."

Not surprisingly, not a single real estate professional who published the author's copyright protected material agreed to go public with his or her reasons.

But the point here is not to name names or try these real estate professionals in the press, but to inform them and others who would be copyright violators.

Why copyright protection exists

From a legal standpoint, here's the properly attributed comments from RealtyTimes' editor Blanche Evans in a previous article on the subject, "Just Say Not To Copyright Violations".

"Just follow these golden copyright rules: If you don't own it, it isn't yours. If you have to get it from someone else, then it's theirs. If it belongs to someone else, it probably isn't free, so there will most likely be conditions attached to using it. All you have to (do to) find out what they (conditions) are, is to ask. If you want to use anything that belongs to someone else, always ask."

Like most laws, the copyright law isn't a violation of or in conflict with other rights or privileges, but an attempt at fairness and equity on behalf of the person who created the intellectual property. The law comes with "fair use" exceptions allowing noncommercial entities, including charities and educational institutions, to use certain materials for charitable and educational purposes.

Anyone who regularly handles copyright protected materials has a duty to know at least the law's basic tenets and the principles behind it's power.

From a more practical standpoint, nabbing copyright protected work for your blog implies permission has been granted. If that editorial content is used out of context, say to make a point about some heated issue, there's the potential for an implied agreement or disagreement from the author, which the author likely never intended.

That could bring on a libel suit.

No matter what favor you may think you are doing a writer, no matter how little value you attribute to the editorial content or to the efforts that went into producing it and no matter how many reasons you can come up with to justify a copyright violation, no one wants their work stolen and bandied about like worthless fodder.

Stolen copyright protected property is often devalued property, watered down by frequent appearances. That gives it a canned, everybody-owns-it value. When that's the case, by extension, nobody wants it.

Bottom line?

There's always a bottom line for someone's hard work.

Intellectual property has value.

If you reduce or remove that value in any way, you could be liable for those losses.

Follow the golden copyright protection rules rules without looking for loopholes that could snag you in a court suit.

Published: November 21, 2006

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.