Ex-Realtor.com Editor Defends Himself in Lengthy Statement

Former Realtor.com editor James Kaminsky has filed a lengthy statement outlining his defence in an ongoing lawsuit involving his former employer and rival portal operator CoStar.

Kaminsky's filing, a 36-page statement, strongly denies foul play and gives what appears to be a comprehensive insight into his version of events from the days immediately before he departed Move Inc. (the owner-operator of Realtor.com) and his subsequent access to what Move alleges are sensitive documents after he joined CoStar.

The statement says:

"To be clear, I no longer have access to any of the four documents that, in its Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Move alleges contain trade secret information. I did not print the documents, save them externally or otherwise preserve them in my records.

"I have never shared the records with anyone at CoStar, or used them in any capacity in the course of my work for CoStar or in any way in competition with Move."

"I have not engaged in any work at CoStar that competes with Move’s News & Insights group, nor have I assisted anyone at CoStar in doing so.

"I am currently on administrative leave. I have no access to CoStar’s computer system and am doing no work for CoStar other than assisting with the response to Move’s lawsuit.

"My new job at CoStar is entirely different from my prior job at Move. I readily disclosed my new job and its responsibilities to several people at Move; I was proud of it. I never imagined that Move would have any issue with it at all and certainly never tried to hide it from Move.

"Given all of the Move personnel who I met with and described my new role, I am shocked and surprised that Move informed the Court and claimed in the press that I am engaged in an effort to build a news department at CoStar to rival the News & Insights department I ran at Move. It is again simply not true."

Kaminsky's filing also questions the security of internal documents, stating:

"In my experience at the company, we would not infrequently see names appear on documents that we did not expect to be there – we would just remove them. It was not a very secure system.

"The fact that I could grant permission to my personal email address [redacted], not a Move.com email address, to access the documents suggested to me that the documents were and are not highly significant proprietary documents.

"Certainly, I did not expect that anyone at Move would be concerned by my access to these documents. The documents did not, in my view, contain highly sensitive materials."

Kaminsky's filing also reveals his surprise at still having access to certain documents while searching for old paystubs in emails he had forwarded himself from his time at Move and reiterated that he did not use any of those documents for his work at CoStar, nor shared them with colleagues or leadership at CoStar.

"I recall being surprised that I still had access to the documents and that the links were still active.

"I clicked through the documents to see what they were and to satisfy some basic curiosity. None of the documents were relevant to my work at CoStar.

"My job at Move was to manage a department in which we identified, wrote, and published news articles designed to draw traffic to the Realtor.com website regarding a wide range of economic and business issues relating to residential real estate and more pop culture articles about celebrities and their homes.

"The writings are connected on the website to listings relating to those buildings; it is not a stand-alone feature designed to drive traffic to the website.

"To my knowledge, CoStar does not track traffic at this time to this portion of Homes.com. I have never seen any statistics about audience traffic, and I have never been asked to focus on growing Internet traffic."

Finally, Kamsinky brushes off Move's lawsuit against CoStar as "baseless":

"I have already provided my work and personal computers and electronic devices to a forensic examiner who I understand CoStar and my counsel retained for the purpose of establishing the facts relating to the Complaint and the Motion for Preliminary Injunction and supporting our defense against the baseless claims Move has asserted against CoStar and me."

Kaminsky is currently on administrative leave while the lawsuit continues.