A real estate photographer has sued the creator of a wildly popular media site that posts about distinctive properties, saying the creator used two of her photographs without her permission.
Veteran photographer Jennnifer Bouma, of Washington State, has filed a copyright infringement complaint against Zillow Gone Wild. She took the photos in 2021 and copyrighted them in 2022; Zillow Gone Wild reproduced them on its Substack as well as its social media feeds in 2022 without notifying Bouma.
She discovered the photos, of a $1.9 million home in Monroe, Washington, on Zillow Gone Wild in April and notified the company, but, according the complaint, the parties haven’t been able to negotiate a licensing agreement. Bouma declined an interview request.
The complaint seeks up to $150,000 for each infringement.
Courtesy Zillow Gone Wild.
“Zillow Gone Wild is not the only entity that does what they appear to be doing, which is to aggregate photos of a certain subject matter and act as a clearinghouse for a curated version of those images,” said her lawyer, David C. Deal. “What Zillow Gone Wild and others do is they leverage their popularity for financial gain.
“The photographers are typically left out of the equation,” said Deal. “They’re not part of the negotiations when a real estate agent who has hired a photographer chooses to grant permission to someone like Zillow Gone Wild. They appear to pay no attention to the intellectual property rights of photographers.”
Zillow Gone Wild did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zillow Gone Wild boasts some four million followers on the major social media platforms. A few recent examples of homes it highlights, from its Instagram: a “rare Mansion x Castle crossover in Henderson, NV” with “castley vibes,” listed at $10 million; a $20 million, 13th-century Italian villa that, so says the listing, once belonged to the Mona Lisa’s husband; and, just for the lulz, a $1,930,000 home in Belleville, Michigan, that supposedly has two bedrooms and 86 baths in its 1,396 square feet.
Zillow Gone Wild was the brainchild of Samir Mezrahi, social media director for Buzzfeed. When he made his first post, in 2020, it tapped into a COVID-driven moment of fascination with real estate by the homebound millions, suddenly taken with the possibility of moving wherever they liked as work went remote and with skyrocketing home prices. Its popularity has led to an HGTV show, starring Jack McBrayer of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Office fame, with Mezrahi as executive producer.
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