Zillow and McMansion Hell have buried the hatchet. The company won’t sue, and the blog won’t use images from Zillow anymore. However, the blog's creator, Kate Wagner, will keep all archival Zillow images (including her commentary) on her site.

In a brief statement, Zillow said it will “not pursue any legal action.” The company issued the statement shortly after an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney representing Kate Wagner fired back at Zillow in a five-page letter. Wagner is behind the viral architecture blog, McMansion Hell.

On Monday, Wagner received a demand letter from Zillow threatening a lawsuit over spurious copyright claims and possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a federal anti-hacking law. Even more bizarrely, as the EFF letter pointed out, Zillow did not own the images in question—it merely licensed them from others. So it wasn’t clear how Zillow would have had standing to bring a suit. Plus, even if the company did somehow have standing, her satirical commentary was arguably protected under the Fair Use doctrine of American copyright law.

"To the extent Wagner’s commentary harms the market for real estate photography by making people realize that certain homes are poorly designed, that is not a cognizable copyright injury," the EFF's Daniel Nazer wrote.

After Zillow's letter, Wagner temporarily disabled the domain name, making her blog unviewable. However, as of Thursday, she restored McMansion Hell in full.

Zillow’s statement continued:

We’ve had a lot of conversations about this, including with attorneys from the EFF, whose advocacy and work we respect. EFF has stated that McMansion Hell won’t use photos from Zillow moving forward. It was never our intent for McMansion Hell to shut down or for this to appear as an attack on Kate’s freedom of expression. We acted out of an abundance of caution to protect our partners—the agents and brokers who entrust us to display photos of their clients’ homes.

Emily Heffter, a Zillow spokeswoman, declined Ars' questions as to why Zillow sent off this letter in the first place or if it had sent similar letters to other individuals.