McMansion Hell revives its hilarious blog after ending legal spat with Zillow

Real estate platform Zillow has finally come to its senses and backed off from suing McMansion Hell, a blog that highlights architectural atrocities committed by tasteless homeowners on their own houses across the US.

Earlier this week, Zillow had sent Kate Wagner – the one-woman show behind McMansion Hell – a cease-and-desist letter, urging her to stop using photos from its site that she used to annotate and post on her blog.

Somebody help me, Zillow is threatening to sue me pic.twitter.com/mEiQ7ddiqS

— bad house tweeter ? (@mcmansionhell) June 26, 2017

It turned out that Zillow didn’t technically own the images it was claiming to have copyright over, and after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sent a legal response (including a clause which stated that Wagner wouldn’t use any more photos from Zillow – here’s the PDF), the company has decided to drop the case.

For those who aren’t in the loop, McMansion Hell does an excellent job of pointing out everything that’s wrong with the architecture of outrageously designed homes. Wagner’s favorite targets are houses that clearly have cost a lot to build, but have been fashioned with little to no thought about basic design principles.

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As you rifle through the blog’s archive of hilarious posts, you’ll also find yourself learning about architectural movements and simple ideas to improve your own residential space. That’s a blog worth fighting a legal battle for.

After taking the blog down for most of this week, Wagner has now restored it in its entirety – so do yourself a favor and get to reading it, even if you’re not building a house of your own in the next year or decade. And if you’re wondering about what constitutes fair use when sharing images from around the web on your blog, check out Lifehacker’s primer on the subject.