Summary

• Model to copy: CompStak's give-to-get credits, recency-weighted, with layered verification. Free for professionals, paid for enterprise.
• Model to avoid: CoStar's use of contributors' content with no credit or payment, and Spotify's opaque pooled payouts with a minimum threshold.
• Biggest legal risk: leases, rent rolls and bids are usually confidential by contract. Publishing facts from them can expose us to inducement-of-breach and trade-secret claims.
• Biggest business risk: if buyers pay in credits, a designer's 70% is also credit, which cannot pay rent. Decide whether designers can cash out.
• Where credit goes: every contributor credit is applied only to plan transfer fees (decided 2026-10-05). It never pays a designer's 70% and has no other use, so it is a discount on the buyer's side of a plan request.
• Do now: register a DMCA agent (about $6), make facts-only the default visibility, and book a scoping call with a New York attorney.

Market research

As of 2026-10-05. Figures come from search results and press or vendor pages, not filings, unless stated.

CoStar Group

• Model: subscriptions to commercial real estate data plus marketplaces (LoopNet, Apartments.com, Homes.com). 2025 revenue about $3.2B, up 19%, with only $7M net income because of acquisitions and Homes.com spending (HousingWire).
• Anonymous pricing: a contributor may hide their name and firm from everyone. BuildNYC still knows who they are (an account is required for credit, fraud checks and takedowns). Fully anonymous uploads with no account are not accepted, because the waiver, the rights warranty and the confidentiality complaint channel depend on knowing who made them. Small samples can identify a source (one bid on a one-bidder trade), so combine figures only when several independent sources exist. CONFIRM with counsel how far BuildNYC can promise anonymity against a subpoena or a confidentiality claim.
• Pricing: not published. Third-party estimates run $3,000 to $23,000 per user per year (Vendr, unverified).
• Data sourcing: its own researchers and photographers, plus broker listings on LoopNet. No evidence it pays contributors; brokers get exposure.
• Litigation: Xceligent, a proposed $500M judgment over 38,000 images, with insurers paying only $10.75M (Bisnow). CREXi, where on 2025-06-25 the court found it copied and cropped CoStar photos, with damages still to be decided (CoStar, a one-sided source). Zillow, sued July 2025 over about 47,000 photos. CoStar also won a breach-of-contract case over database access.
• Weaknesses: high opaque pricing, stale data when brokers stop contributing, brokers resent it reselling their listings, and it sues competitors.

CompStak

• Model: free for brokers, appraisers and researchers, who submit lease and sale comps and earn credits to unlock others' comps. Enterprise customers pay for data licenses (CompStak).
• Credit values: a comp dated within 12 months with all fields earns 30 credits; an older one earns 5 (help). Credits do not expire.
• Verification: pre-qualified members, machine-learning anomaly flags, in-house analyst review, version history on every comp, and member corrections (CRE Daily).
• Reach: 40,000+ contributors, 3.4M properties, 105 markets, strongest in office, retail and industrial.
• Weaknesses: thin multifamily data, no owner contacts, fixed credit values. No lawsuits were found, which is a gap in the search and not proof there are none.

Spotify and comparable marketplaces

• Payout model: one pool of subscription and ad revenue, split by share of total streams. About 70% goes to rights holders, meaning labels and publishers, so artists receive whatever their contract gives them (Hypebot). Paid out $11B in 2025.
• Complaints: tracks under 1,000 streams a year earn nothing since April 2024 (MBW); a pooled model favors big stars; Discovery Mode trades a royalty cut for promotion.
• Lesson: Spotify's "70%" often reaches the creator as far less. Ours goes straight to the designer, which is a stronger story. But a drawing view is a discrete sale to a named buyer, so pay per approved access, not from a pool.
• Comparables (unverified): Shutterstock pays contributors 15 to 40%, Getty 20 to 30%, Fiverr takes 20% from sellers plus a 5.5% buyer fee, Upwork a variable 0 to 15%. A 70% share is a real recruiting advantage.

Not found: CoStar's contributor terms and primary-source Spotify rate data. Verify the Shutterstock, Getty, Fiverr and Upwork numbers on their own pages before quoting them.

Facts-only model: legal analysis

Our model: we extract facts such as sheet titles, floors, tenants, firms, scope items and dates. Files sit in private storage and are read by AI. We never copy, trace, redraw or display the linework.

1. Facts versus expression

• Copyright protects expression, not facts or ideas (17 U.S.C. 102(b); Feist v. Rural). Sheet titles, floor and tenant labels, firm names, scope items and dates are facts. Reading them off a drawing and recording them is not infringement on its own.
• The architectural works law protects the building design and the plans' expression. It is triggered by reproducing or displaying the plans, or building from them, not by recording facts.
• Limit: long verbatim notes or specification text, or extraction that closely tracks a drawing's selection and arrangement, can look like expression. Keep outputs short and discrete. CONFIRM.

2. Storing the file and AI-reading it

• Technically this makes copies. Courts have held copying to extract unprotectable data to be fair use: Authors Guild v. Google (Second Circuit, which covers New York), Sega v. Accolade, Perfect 10 v. Amazon, Kelly v. Arriba Soft.
• In 2025, Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta held training on lawfully acquired works to be transformative fair use. Bartz held that a library built from pirated copies was not protected, and later settled. These are district-court rulings, not binding in New York; check for appeals (summary).
• Our four factors: purpose is transformative (extract facts, do not republish); drawings are creative but largely functional; the whole file is copied but as a private input; and market effect is nil because nothing is displayed. The last is our best factor.
• Weak point: a file from someone with no right to share it, for example one who breached an NDA. That puts the "lawfully acquired" element in doubt. Fair use is a defense, not a safe harbor, so we would pay to litigate it. CONFIRM.

3. License, warranties, DMCA agent, confidentiality

• Minimal license: non-exclusive, worldwide, to store privately, machine-read and extract facts, retain for audit and disputes, share with vendors only for those purposes, and publish extracted facts. No right to display, reproduce publicly or create derivative works. Do not offer a display license at launch.
• Warranties: the contributor has the right to give us the file for this purpose, the facts are accurate to their knowledge, and the upload breaches no NDA or confidentiality duty. Add an indemnity for breach.
• DMCA agent: register one anyway. About $6, renewed every 3 years (registration). With nothing displayed it matters less, but it is cheap and covers the rest of the product. Without it the safe harbor is lost. Takedown notices do not help with confidentiality claims, so add a separate confidential-information complaint channel. CONFIRM.
• Confidentiality is the main unresolved risk. Leases, bids, rent rolls and subcontractor data are often under NDAs. Facts are not copyrightable but can be confidential or trade secrets. Publishing them can breach the contributor's contract and expose us to tortious-interference, trade-secret and unjust-enrichment claims (DTSA). Facts-only does not reduce this and can aggravate it, because the facts are the confidential part.
• Mitigations: a confidentiality warranty, a fast complaint channel, facts-only as the default, review before publishing, and a rule never to publish pricing facts from bids and leases without clear authority.
• Section 230: because we review and republish facts in our own voice, a court may treat us as the content's developer and 230 may not protect us. Tenant "corrections" carry the most defamation and privacy risk (47 U.S.C. 230). CONFIRM.

4. Marketplace and sealed drawings

• We never serve drawings, so the marketplace is a connection service. Copyright risk stays with the professional and the buyer, but contributory-liability theories apply if we facilitate access to a drawing a seller does not own. Keep the authority warranty, the professional's approval for each buyer, and view-only watermarked access.
• Sealing is governed by NY Education Law 7307 and 8 NYCRR 29.3. Extracting facts from a sealed drawing does not reuse or alter it, so the seal rules are not engaged. The marketplace should bar buyers from altering, re-sealing or filing what they view. CONFIRM.
• By default the architect owns the copyright in drawings and the owner holds a limited license for that project, so a building owner or contractor holding a copy often cannot sell or license it. Requiring the designer's approval is right.

Other legal items

Contributor terms essentials

• Credits: non-cash, non-transferable, usable only toward plan transfer fees, not property, adjustable or forfeited for fraud, duplicates or false data. Pay for verified facts only. Expiry on purchased credits needs a lawyer. The researcher is not certain of the exact rules.
• Disclaimers: label contributed facts "contributed, not verified". Cap liability with the usual carve-outs; New York courts do not enforce limits against gross negligence.
• Disputes: New York law, click-wrap assent, arbitration with a class waiver and a mass-arbitration plan. CONFIRM.
• Contributors who share logins to other databases such as CoStar or CompStak, or upload material taken from them, pass that contract risk to us. Ban it in the terms.
• CoStar v. Xceligent and CREXi: CoStar's wins were mainly about photographs, which are copyrightable. Xceligent's ToS warranty did not protect it when contributors uploaded material they did not own, and a platform that reviews content loses the passive-host defense. Facts-only avoids the photo claims, not the contract ones.
• No database right exists in the US, only thin protection for selection and arrangement. Our protection is contract and trade-secret law.

Payments and tax

• Stripe Connect: use hosted onboarding so Stripe holds identity data, not us. Money-transmitter risk arises if we hold and move funds ourselves. CONFIRM.
• Tax forms: contributor credits may be reportable income; get a W-9 for large amounts. Thresholds have changed, so check current figures (IRS).
• Sales tax: New York generally taxes SaaS as prewritten software (Alston). Marketplace commissions may be treated differently. CONFIRM with a CPA.
• Stored value: earned credits are probably not gift certificates, but selling credits would change that, and unclaimed-property rules may reach stored value. CONFIRM.

Privacy and security

• NY SHIELD Act requires reasonable safeguards and breach notice (GBL 899-bb). CCPA likely does not apply yet; check thresholds.
• Keep identity documents at Stripe. Collect the minimum from tenant corrections and rent rolls, and set retention limits.
• Do not extract or publish facts about security systems, vaults, critical infrastructure or fire command centers. Filed DOB plans are generally public records but that does not license the copyright. The researcher could not verify current DOB access rules or any post-9/11 restriction. CONFIRM.

Waivers for uploaded content

Draft wording for the waiver a contributor accepts on every upload. It matches the facts-only model and is shown on the Upload content form as separate boxes, each of which must be ticked. A draft for a New York attorney to revise, not final legal text. Plain language is deliberate: a waiver a person can read is easier to enforce.

Contributor waiver and release (draft)

1. Right to share. I own this content, or I have written permission to share it with BuildNYC for the purpose below. I am not breaking any confidentiality agreement, lease clause, bid rule, employment duty or license by sharing it.
2. What BuildNYC may do. I give BuildNYC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store my file privately, read it by machine, extract facts from it (such as sheet titles, floors, tenants, firms, scope items and dates), keep it for audit and dispute purposes, share it only with service providers who help us do these things, and publish the extracted facts labeled as contributed. BuildNYC will not display, copy, trace or redraw the drawings or other documents themselves.
3. I keep ownership. I keep my rights in what I upload. This license does not transfer ownership.
4. Facts, not guarantees. I believe the information is accurate. BuildNYC may check it, change it, label it as unverified, decline it or remove it, and does not promise to publish it.
5. Withdrawal. I may ask BuildNYC to remove my upload at any time. Facts already published in good faith may remain unless BuildNYC removes them for cause or because of a complaint.
6. Release of claims. I release BuildNYC from claims arising from its use of my upload as described above, including claims that extracting or publishing the facts infringes my rights, to the extent the law allows. I do not release claims that BuildNYC went beyond the license above, or that cannot be waived by law.
7. Indemnity. If my statements in this waiver are untrue and BuildNYC suffers a claim as a result, I will cover BuildNYC's reasonable costs of dealing with it.
8. Sensitive information. I will not upload security-system details, vault or critical-infrastructure information, or personal data I have no right to share. BuildNYC may remove anything that looks sensitive without notice.
9. Other databases. I did not take this content from another paid database or by using someone else's login, and I will not.
10. Credits. Credit is not cash and not property, and goes only toward plan transfer fees. It is granted only for accepted, verified contributions and can be withdrawn for fraud, duplicates or false information.

Extra acknowledgements by type

• Leases, rent rolls and bids: "I confirm I am a party to this document or have its owner's written permission, and I understand BuildNYC will not publish rent or price terms without clear authority."
• Tenant corrections: "I believe this correction is true and I understand it is shown as a contributed correction next to the original, which is kept."
• Shop drawings from subcontractors: "My firm prepared these, or I have my firm's written permission to share them, and I have checked that my contract with the general contractor or owner does not forbid sharing them. BuildNYC reads them only for facts and does not display them."
• Pricing: "These are my own firm's prices, or I have my firm's written permission to share them. BuildNYC will not publish a named firm's pricing; it is shown only as combined, unnamed market figures."
• Photos: "I took these photos, or my firm owns the copyright, or the photographer has given written permission. They are not copied from Google, CoStar, a listing site or anyone else. If I choose to have them shown on the building page, BuildNYC may display them with credit to me, and I keep ownership."
• Owners' drawings and keys: "I own this building and may give my own vendors view-only keys to these drawings for work on it. I will not sell, license, rent or charge for the drawings or for access to them, and I will not use a key to pass them to anyone other than the vendor named on it."
• Digital keys (draft consequences): a key opens only for the vendor's verified email after sign-in and acceptance of the viewing terms; three attempts by anyone else revoke it; a confirmed misuse closes the vendor's account; an owner who sells or charges for drawings or access loses the vault and may lose contributions and credit. CONFIRM enforceability and the damages wording with counsel.
• Tenant improvement offers: "I am a party to this offer, or act for a party, or have a party's written permission to share it. BuildNYC will not publish the offer for a named building or tenant; it is used only in combined, unnamed market figures." Concession terms (TI allowance, free rent) are commercially sensitive and often under NDA, so they are treated like pricing: private or facts-only, never shown beside a named landlord or tenant. CONFIRM with counsel.
• Drawings: "I understand BuildNYC reads the drawing only for facts and does not display it. I have the right to give BuildNYC this file, and the design professional of record has not restricted it."

Design professional waiver (marketplace, draft)

• I own or control the rights to authorize viewing of this drawing, and I approve each buyer myself.
• Viewing is view-only, watermarked and redacted as I choose. BuildNYC does not host or copy the drawing, and I am responsible for any seal and professional-conduct obligations I owe.
• I will be paid 70% of the fee for each approved request, through Stripe. Chargebacks and refunds may reverse my share.

Photos are different

• Photographs are copyrightable, and they are what CoStar won on against Xceligent and CREXi. Unlike drawings and documents, photos are the one content type where we may want to display the file, which takes us out of the facts-only model. Facts read from a photo (signage, floor, condition) stay low risk. Displaying a photo needs a display license, a warranty that the contributor owns it, and a prompt takedown path.
• Rules for the photo type: the contributor must have taken it or hold the rights; nothing copied from Google, CoStar or a listing site; no identifiable people, no interiors showing security systems; location data stripped before display. Photos default to private; display is a separate opt-in. CONFIRM with counsel before any photo is shown publicly.

How a waiver will not work on its own

• A waiver will not protect us against claims the law will not let anyone waive, or against a person who never agreed to it (for example a tenant named in a lease the uploader had no right to share). It is one layer with the screening, confirmation boxes, takedown path and complaint channel above.
• It must be accepted by clicking, with the text shown, and the acceptance recorded with the account, time and version. CONFIRM with counsel whether clear click acceptance is enough for the release and indemnity wording.

Terms outlines

Headings with the one-line position on each. Starting points for a lawyer to mark up, not final terms.

Questions for a New York attorney

1. Is facts-only extraction from contributed drawings (sheet titles, floors, tenants, firms, scope, dates) outside copyright and the architectural works law? What kinds of text should we not extract?
2. Is private storage plus AI reading fair use in the Second Circuit, and does it matter how the contributor obtained the file?
3. What is the minimal license and warranty language, and do we still need to register a DMCA agent?
4. How do we handle NDA and trade-secret exposure for leases, bids and rent rolls (screening, indemnity, complaint channel, insurance)?
5. Does reviewing and republishing cost us Section 230 protection, and what is our defamation exposure on tenant corrections?
6. Marketplace: contributory liability, seal-reuse language, DOB and security restrictions, and the money-movement licensing question for Stripe Connect.
7. Credits: are earned credits gift certificates or unclaimed property, and does selling credits change that? Can they expire?
8. Is contributor credit reportable income, and do we issue 1099s?
9. How is SaaS sales tax computed when credits are applied, and are marketplace commissions taxable?
10. Insurance: media liability, cyber and errors and omissions.

Rough cost (the researcher's own estimate, not sourced)

New York technology counsel at about $350 to $900 an hour. About $4,000 to $10,000 flat for Contributor Terms and a privacy policy, and $6,000 to $15,000 for Marketplace Terms plus a tax and money-movement review. Roughly $10,000 to $25,000 in total. A cheaper start is a one-to-two hour scoping call, then having the lawyer mark up our drafts. Add a CPA consult of about $500 to $2,000 for the tax questions.