REDPLAN Inc., the nonprofit organization launched in July to help multiple listing services, associations and brokers protect their intellectual property, has named data security attorney Darity Wesley as its first full-time administrator.
Wesley, founder of the real estate-focused data licensing consulting firm Privacy Solutions Inc., and senior lawyer and founder of San Diego-based Lotus Law Center, will lead the day-to-day operations of the new association.
Darity Wesley
“Darity brings incredible legal experience, industry insight and a career’s worth of dedication to bring data security and intellectual property protection from its infancy to its current stage of being able to support our industrywide organization,” said Gregg Larson, founder and CEO of both Clareity Consulting Inc. and Clareity Security, and one of the five founding board members of REDPLAN, in a statement.
“She has the depth and breadth of knowledge we need to make my dream of stopping data piracy and protecting the valuable assets of the real estate information industry happen once and for all,” Larson said.
REDPLAN stands for Real Estate Data Protection Legal Association Nonprofit, and was founded to help MLSs and brokers coordinate their efforts against data piracy.
“My mission with REDPLAN is to put the structures in place to help the real estate information industry protect its intellectual property assets, promote industry education on data use compliance, and pursue violators of the laws that poison the life blood of the real estate industry, the flow of data,” Wesley said in a statement.
Larson, who spearheaded the group, has said the group will support the real estate industry intellectual property rights at large and also support firms or groups of firms who want to legally pursue alleged data pirates.
“There are dozens of operators that have been stealing data for decades and have been able to stay underground or nearly underground and aren’t afraid of MLSs. There just hasn’t been a national deterrent,” Larson told Inman News in July, shortly after the group officially launched.
REDPLAN members pay an annual membership fee that shifts depending on their size and yearly revenue, ranging from $1,500 to $20,000.
The other four members of the founding board are: John Mosey, CEO of St. Paul, Minn.-based NorthstarMLS; Martin Scrocchi, CEO of paperless transaction management firm Instanet Solutions; Jay Gaskill, CEO of real estate technology company Real Estate Digital; and Claude Szyfer, an antitrust lawyer and partner at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP.
