Real Estate Appraisals and Copyrighting Facts [Repost from Concurring Opinions’ Archive]

[In 2007, I guest-blogged at the group law professor blog Concurring Opinions. With the demise of that blog, I am now archiving my guest posts on my own blog. This post first appeared on January 28, 2007.] As reported by the Washington Post, an interesting intellectual property dispute is brewing in the real estate appraisal business. On one side are traditional real estate appraisers, who charge several hundred dollars for an appraisal that typically involves an onsite inspection. On the other side are online appraisal services that, relying on their databases and some algorithms, offer lenders an instantaneous appraisal at a small fraction of the cost. The traditional appraisers are upset because the online services may be extracting information from their appraisals and using that information to improve their databases (and thus the accuracy of their online appraisals). Taken to its logical extreme, as online appraisers get better databases by capturing data from…

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