On March 16 a hacker using the pseudonym Ian Dawtnapster broke into the computer systems of a national real estate firm and downloaded blank home-buying and -selling forms. The infiltrator did so by breaching an online document-sharing forum run for the firm by Dotloop, a Cincinnati-based startup that seeks to make it easier for consumers to do property transactions.
Soon after the incident, Dotloop says, two real estate organizations that own the copyrights on the forms demanded that Dotloop take the documents off its servers. Dotloop says it complied with the requests from the California Association of Realtors and the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NMLS). It then filed a motion in federal court in Northern California seeking the authority to subpoena CAR andGoogle (GOOG) to search e-mails that might reveal the identity of the online vandal. CAR spokeswoman Lotus Lou says the group had nothing to do with the hack and isn’t a defendant in any litigation, and called the subpoena request “unwarranted.†On Aug. 27 a court granted Dotloop authority to subpoena CAR, Google, and NMLS, among others.
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