McMansion Hell Responds to Zillow’s Unfounded Legal Claims
-
Earlier this week, Zillow sent an aggressive cease and desist letter [PDF] to Kate Wagner, the creator of the McMansion Hell website. Zillow demanded that Wagner remove any image originally sourced from Zillow’s site. Today EFF sent a response to Zillow on Wagner’s behalf. Our letter [PDF] explains why none of Zillow’s contentions have any merit. Zillow should abandon its demand and respect online freedom of expression.
McMansion Hell is an architecture blog focused on contemporary residential housing. Using humor and parody, Wagner tries to illustrate the architectural horror of modern McMansions. Her posts usually include annotated photographs of houses to illustrate her commentary. In addition to posts critiquing individual homes, Wagner publishes essays about urbanism, architecture, sociology, and interior design. After receiving Zillow’s threat, Wagner temporarily disabled access to her blog via McMansionHell.com. She is relaunching the blog in full today.
Zillow’s demand letter made a number of highly dubious legal claims. For example, Zillow argued that Wagner does not make fair use of the photographs she annotates. Importantly, Zillow does not own, and cannot assert, the copyright in these photos. But even if it could, McMansion Hell’s annotation of photographs for the purpose of criticism and commentary is a classic example of fair use.
Zillow also suggested, without any explanation, that Wagner may have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). EFF has long fought against overbroad applications of the CFAA, which is the federal anti-hacking statute intended to criminalize unauthorized intrusions into computer networks. There is no basis for a CFAA claim against Wagner. To the extent Zillow was suggesting that she might have violated the CFAA by violating Zillow’s terms of service, courts have repeatedly rejected such claims.
In subsequent comments to the media and in a conversation with EFF, Zillow has suggested that its fundamental complaint is based on its terms of use, which purports to prohibit any reproduction or modification of images on its site. But, even if these provisions applied (which they do not), they are unenforceable for the many reasons we outline in our letter. For example, the recently enacted Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 invalidates any contract that restricts a consumer’s ability to review a product or service. The statute expressly protects “pictorial reviews” and covers McMansion Hell.
Zillow’s letter unleashed a wave of negative publicity for the company. In response, Zillow has insisted that it did not intend to shut down Wagner’s blog. However, it does appear to be standing by its demand that she remove all images sourced from Zillow’s website. Zillow has no basis for such a demand and our client will not be removing any previous posts. She has informed Zillow, however, that she is not interested in using its site for her blog in the future. We hope Zillow does the right thing and renounces its attempt to censor McMansion Hell.

screen and tmux
A comparison of the features (or more-so just a table of notes for accessing some of those features) for GNU screen and BSD-licensed tmux.
The formatting here is simple enough to understand (I would hope). ^ means ctrl+, so ^x is ctrl+x. M- means meta (generally left-alt or escape)+, so M-x is left-alt+x It should be noted that this is no where near a full feature-set of either group. This - being a cheat-sheet - is just to point out the most very basic features to get you on the road. Trust the developers and manpage writers more than me. This document is originally from 2009 when tmux was still new - since then both of these programs have had many updates and features added (not all of which have been dutifully noted here). |
||
Action | tmux | screen |
start a new session | tmux OR tmux new OR tmux new-session |
screen |
re-attach a detached session | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen-r |
re-attach an attached session (detaching it from elsewhere) | tmux attach -d OR tmux attach-session -d |
screen -dr |
re-attach an attached session (keeping it attached elsewhere) | tmux attach OR tmux attach-session |
screen -x |
detach from currently attached session | ^b d OR ^b :detach |
^a ^d OR ^a :detach |
rename-window to newname | ^b , <newname> OR ^b :rename-window <newn> |
^a A <newname> |
list windows | ^b w | ^a w |
list windows in chooseable menu | ^a " | |
go to window # | ^b # | ^a # |
go to last-active window | ^b l | ^a ^a |
go to next window | ^b n | ^a n |
go to previous window | ^b p | ^a p |
see keybindings | ^b ? | ^a ? |
list sessions | ^b s OR tmux ls OR tmux list-sessions |
screen -ls |
toggle visual bell | ^a ^g | |
create another window | ^b c | ^a c |
exit current shell/window | ^d | ^d |
split window/pane horizontally | ^b " | ^a S |
split window/pane vertically | ^b % | ^a | |
switch to other pane | ^b o | ^a <tab> |
kill the current pane | ^b x OR (logout/^D) | |
collapse the current pane/split (but leave processes running) | ^a X | |
cycle location of panes | ^b ^o | |
swap current pane with previous | ^b { | |
swap current pane with next | ^b } | |
show time | ^b t | |
show numeric values of panes | ^b q | |
toggle zoom-state of current pane (maximize/return current pane) | ^b z | |
break the current pane out of its window (to form new window) | ^b ! | |
re-arrange current panels within same window (different layouts) | ^b [space] | |
Kill the current window (and all panes within) | ^b killw [target-window] |