AIR BNB goes to court in NY

As part of an investigation into illegal use of Airbnb — the web service that lets you pay to stay wherever someone else has a free room — New York’s attorney general has subpoenaed personal information on 225,000 state residents who use the short-term housing marketplace.
The subpoena is reportedly part of an effort to crack down on landlords who evict tenants in order to rent their former units on Airbnb. Reports say that the state attorney general is also looking to punish absentee tenants who are gone most of the year, using their apartments mainly to generate income via Airbnb.
“A drunk European for one week is one thing,” a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News. “If you have to live with it 40 weeks a year, that’s a big difference.”
In the city of New York, Airbnb has been involved in a protracted battle over the legality of using its service. A New York law bans rentals for less than 30 days if the owner is not around. Airbnb says the law is clearly intended to stop illegal hotels, not peer-to-peer sharing, and it won an apparent victory last month when a city board reversed a fine against Airbnb user Nigel Warren. But that case concerned sharing an apartment via Airbnb while one of the lessees was home, so it could still be deemed illegal to rent an unoccupied apartment via Airbnb, as is commonly done.
Airbnb has tried to get out in front of New York regulatory issues by offering to collect hotel tax on its rentals. But government officials don’t seem interested in being co-opted, and Airbnb now says the state attorney general is going too far.
“Even the politicians who wrote the original law agree it was never designed to target regular people who occasionally share their homes,” an Airbnb statement reads. “We are concerned that this is an unreasonably broad government demand for user data and we remain committed to protecting our users’ privacy.”
The company could not be reached for comment on whether it plans to fight the subpoena. But clearly its struggles with Gotham’s city and state regulators will continue for a while longer.