[webmaster]

Ok I am a little bothered by this. We have a member (Who will remain nameless) that submitted to our directory. Of course with his great site and proper adherance to our terms of submission we listed him.

Now, he is in the Sea / Tac area of Washington, and his board is the North West MLS (or NWMLS) and it turns out the board found his listing on our directory and decided they did not like that in his description he had "Search the Seattle MLS" and demanded that he remove it.

This really pisses me off. This poor guy is totally being bullied by his board, and doesn't have the $ to fight them or pay fines or have his license suspended so he just has to eat this? That is total BS!

#1 - This person does not own or control realestatewebmasters.com - so how the hell can they threaten to fine him for content that is not even located on his website? I mean yes the content links to his site, but what if it were scraped, or he didn't put it there? What If I wrote a review of his site and said "I like this site because you can "Search the Seattle MLS" and all sorts of other cool features. Who the hell do they think they are?

#2 - The NWMLS does not own the copyright to the phrase "Search Seattle MLS" or "Search the Seattle MLS" or "Search the Seattle Multiple Listings Service" so how can they get away with bullying this poor guy like this? The fines threatened were $5000-$10,000 WTF!

I have a whole bunch more reasons why I am upset with this whole thing and could rant for hours, but I want to open it up to the floor - what do other realtors think of this sort of action (This is not the first time we have seen it) with regards to MLS boards bullying their own members.