Avm's With Pictures

[Tim Hicks (Texas)]

I was speaking with Otis (a fine licensed appraiser) and Kate (a fine licensed trainee) and she was asking about AVM's and data mining. Otis (a certified appraiser) says he copyrights all his pictures to prevent data mining of his pictures. My response was I have never seen an AVM with pictures. As far as I know, they only mine the data. However, I have seen very few AVM's in my small corner of the world. so maybe there are some out there that have pictures too. Are there AVM's out there that mine the data and pictures? Should we be copyrighting our pictures?


Otis also stated he refuses to use any proprietary software. I told him not to worry, that his 17 pages of addenda would "crash" any proprietary functions of the software anyway.


Kinder and gentler, kinder and gentler, kinder and gentler.......

 

[Farm Gal]

Hey duck are you quacking up?

To PROSECUTE a copyright violation (use of a copy written photo) it would have first to come to an appraisers attention that the photo had been scabbed, THEN burden of proof would lie on the appraiser to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the photo was in fact the exact photo taken by the appraiser (probably a costly exercise to acquire expert testimony as to that lil factor)

and THEN last but very importantly not least ...

in order to receive damages the appraiser would have to hire another expert to prove that s/he suffered loss of intellectual or factual material in some damaging manner.

Ya think anyone is gonna ever see a dime for their trouble? :rainfro:

What a sneaky appraiser COULd do is paste a strip across the bottom/top/side of all their photos saying that the picture was proprietary information and belongs to Name addy/phone number...

Then any lender reaper of data would have to at least resize and chop the pic

but why bother?

I ditto your opinion. users of AVMs generally don't use pics

 

[CANative]

My clients pay me to receive a report of an appraisal. The report is theirs.

 

[Karl]

We can't SEEM to get ANYONE to see how corrupt the Appraisal & lending industries are!! U think ANYONE will go after someone that used a picture of a HOUSE that was taken by a Appraiser?? Lets pick our battles. Bet thos "Copyrights' would get Thrown outr of court.

 

[Steve Owen]

My clients pay me to receive a report of an appraisal. The report is theirs.

Technically incorrect. They paid for, and recieved an opinion of value - the appraisal work; the report is not tecnically their property, but merely a vehicle for delivering what is.

If you pay for a CD or DVD, do you own the song or movie? No! The recording industry has had varying levels of success prosecuting people who illegally copy.

So... if you deliver a report with boilerplate that data and copying are protected, and the report is not the property of the client, then they should not be able to mine data or copy the report without permission EVEN IF the report is not copyrighted.

Now... enforcing that little deal is another matter entirely. Also, if you attempted to enforce, it is uncertain where the courts would actually come down on it.

BUT, the report is not the property of the lender-- their fee is for the provision of services; technically, the report remains the property of the appraiser IMHO.

 

[Otis Key]

Originally posted by Greg Boyd@Jan 31 2005, 09:46 AM
My clients pay me to receive a report of an appraisal. The report is theirs.

Sorry Greg, but the way I see it is the same as most other professionals. Your client pays for the service, not the paper nor the right to steal photos or to mine the data. The Duck on the other hand took lessons from a previously locked thread and took some words and added and changed to fit the start of this one.

I said I send and/or upload in pdf and will not do it in ACI, or AI format whereby they can easily and clearly scalp the data. They're going to do it and there isn't anything we can do about it except, as was really discussed, make it harder for the data to be mined. I figure the copyright aspect on the photos is one more fence in the line of a whole bunch of little ones that we can throw out there.

Now, as far as AVM's pictures - never seen them either.

 

[Carnivore]

Originally posted by Karl@Jan 31 2005, 10:50 AM
We can't SEEM to get ANYONE to see how corrupt the Appraisal & lending industries are!! U think ANYONE will go after someone that used a picture of a HOUSE that was taken by a Appraiser?? Lets pick our battles. Bet thos "Copyrights' would get Thrown outr of court.

Karl,

Speculation on your part. There are strict requirements to be able to copyright. When those have been met a certain amount of legal weight comes with the copyrighting. One only has to look around the world to find many examples of copyrighting to see that it is a relevant defense againts illegal profiterring and theft.

Lee Ann's point about going after infringement has some merit, but little relevance to applicablility of laws. In other words you can say this about any laws that are broken. Take Naptster for example. Many end users are learning the hard way about copyright laws. For those of you unfamilar with napster, basically kids were trading music for free across the internet. Many have now been caught and the cost are very high to them(in the thousands of dollars per person).

ftr, my local MLS is now copyrighting all photos. This simply means licensed users of the service,(I am a licensed user), can use the photos for profit, BUT NO ONE ELSE.

 

[alex gilbert]

Some AVM vendors offer "enhanced" reports that do include subject photographs, but these are taken by the vendor not culled from an appraisal.

 

[Hank Henry]

Otis,

They can scan directly from a 1st generation pdf. It also only takes them 5+/- minutes to re-type the data from a faxed appraisal....

No matter what you do, if they want the data, they will get it.