CRT - Fight Listing Theft
New CRT technology fights listing piracy 
CRT hears constantly from MLS and association executives and REALTORS® about listing theft. Scraping of property listings and member information from web pages is an increasing problem in the real estate industry. They want to know how to use technology to protect their listing from being scrapped.
CRT has developed two technologies that can assist your fight to protect your listings - NoScrape and reCaptcha.
NoScrape is a form of rendering. Rendering is an approach being used to defeat bots and is favored by the on-line financial institutions, coupon and ticketing industries. It approaches the problem by differentiating data from information. Rendering generates an image that contains the combined data and image. When servers deliver content that is was already rendered, bots can not simply strip the data from the HTML. Read the CRT NoScrape press release
reCaptcha is a way to tell computers and humans apart and is based on CAPTCHA technology. CAPTCHA is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It identifies the party trying to access your site as a human or a computer program by generating questions that only a human can answer correctly. reCaptcha displays distorted images of a word and challenges the party to correctly enter the word. As with rendering, CAPTCHA technologies are used by financial and ticket industries. Read the CRT reCaptcha press release.
Implementing an effective strategy to prevent this should start with gathering interdisciplinary input including policy, legal and technical perspectives and includes both reactive and proactive elements. Reactive tactics are employed after you think your site is being scraped and require a mix of legal and research resources. Proactive tactics are used to prevent scraping and require investment and technical resources.
Reactive measures taken after you already suspect you have been compromised are expensive and time consuming. If you take proactive measures, they will allow you to avoid some, but not all, reactive situations.
NoScrape and reCaptcha provide a balanced trade-off between utility and defeating screen scrapers. CRT has published a management guide on the subject and what you need to consider. It is an excellent overview for management to come up to speed on the subject.
Read the CRT management guide (92k PDF file) on protecting your listings.
