What's Wrong With Just Competing In The Market? Zillow Sues Trulia For Patent Infringement
from the focus-on-innovation,-not-lawsuits dept
In the Wired story about Trulia's IPO (which oddly, again, suggests that a massive stock price bump on day one is "good," rather than a sign of a company leaving lots of money on the table), there is a somewhat random aside about how Zillow and Trulia are the two key competitors in the space, and noting that Zillow sued Trulia for patent infringement just recently.The patent, 7,970,674, is for "Automatically determining a current value for a real estate property, such as a home, that is tailored to input from a human, such as its owner." Got that? Basically, it's for Zillow's "Zestimator" that seeks to take a guess at what any particular house might be worth (an estimate that -- from my view -- often seems completely inaccurate in my own neighborhood, but others may differ). It's a nice feature, no doubt, and it's one that Trulia apparently added to its site... hence the lawsuit.
Even if we assume that Trulia saw what Zillow was doing and flat out copied it -- is that really a problem? Looking specifically at this example (and my experience with Zillow's estimates) this is the kind of thing where it seems like a really good thing to have more competition, driving each company to make their offering even better and more accurate and useful. In other words, just compete in the market and let the best service win. In the past I've been a big fan of Zillow, so I'm disappointed to see them going after competitors with patents, rather than focusing on innovating. It did get me to go check out Trulia again, however, something I hadn't done in years. Though I doubt that was Zillow's intention.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: competition, patents
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Because competition sucks. Look at me, I try my best to compete with all the other shills and, no matter how hard I try, they're consistently dumber than me. What am I doing wrong?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Obviously, you need something shilltastic to set yourself apart from the other shills - possibly the addition of a shilliment to all of your postings would alleviate the aforementioned difficulty.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
IPO almost 30% undervalued?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Thinking this is personal
Lots of other sites are using estimates (I even found one that asks people to crowdsource the estimate) but Trulia's also doing really cool things like puting in crime overlays, school ratings and a "walking score" which I found pretty cool (even if they did misidentify HEB's corporate office as a grocery store).
So yeah, I think Zillow is correctly identifying Trulia as a threat, and they had this stick, so they used it. Shame...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
WOW
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: WOW
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
DUH!
Yes! DUH! Because no one would bother to invent real estate if they didnt have protection! Without patents there would be no land to sell!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Screw Zillow
Trulia seems to know the difference and does not show the quit claim in the sale history.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Quit Claim Deed
If you email the address to social at zillow dot com, we'd be happy to correct the sale history for you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Quit Claim Deed
Thanks for at least reaching out, but I'm confused:
If I need to send email to some hidden address, then what is the point of the flag button next to the erroneous entry on my house's Zillow page that is supposedly for submitting corrections?
My wife and I have each used that flag icon to submit corrections several times or the past 1-2 years, and Zillow has ignored it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The problem is...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Zillow is Now Acquiring Trulia
[ link to this | view in chronology ]