Website hits back at Toronto board
TORONTO • Property listings website Mongohouse is striking back at the Toronto Real Estate Board, claiming that it has suffered losses in excess of $50,000 after it was forced to abruptly shut down its website this month.
In a counterclaim and statement of defence filed Tuesday, lawyers representing Mongohouse.com and its creator, Maxim Mai, allege the lawsuit brought against them by Canada’s largest real estate board was done under the “belief, knowledge or wilful blindness” that the claims were “without merit.”
As a result of the court action, it alleges that both the website and Mai, of Richmond Hill, Ont., have lost revenue, employment income and future employment income due to reputation damage, according to the 75-page document filed in Federal Court.
In September, the real estate board sued Mongohouse for $2 million, alleging the website was illegally accessing, copying and distributing its proprietary data.
The popular website, which provided publicly accessible property listings and sold data, has been offline since Oct. 1.
In its statement of claim, TREB alleged Mongohouse infringed its copyrights by “employing various techniques to illegally data scrape” TREB’s proprietary information that it provides to its fee-paying members through its internal multiple-listings service (MLS).
It goes on to claim that Mongohouse is profiting by its daily “unauthorized access” of this information, which it then displays on its website for free.
But in its statement of defence, Mongohouse refutes the claim that it has ever “data scraped,” copied or distributed any information from TREB’s MLS system.
It says the information used on its website is taken from public resources.
“Mongohouse has never populated the website ... with information from the TREB MLS system,” according to court documents. “The information on the website ... has always been collected from publicly available and accessible sources rather from the TREB MLS system.”
Calling them “bald claims and conclusions,” the website says TREB has not provided proof its information is copyrighted, and that it has suffered damages as a result, “let alone $2,000,000 in damages.”
The lawsuit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court of Canada decision in August to not to hear a case where TREB was fighting to prevent home sales data from being posted on realtors’ password-protected websites.
TREB, which represents more than 52,000 realtors across the Greater Toronto Area, had argued for seven years at three judicial bodies that allowing the data to be released would create privacy and copyright concerns.