This is not a story that I'll enjoy sharing since it shames me but, clearly, this is the spot for it. I was pursued / harassed legally for violating another firm's intellectual property rights last summer. I was absent from this forum for a couple of months around that time and that was, in large measure, the reason why. As an aside, thanks to all of the good people on this forum who reached out to see if I was dead. Frankly, the stress of it all cascaded into some health problems that threatened to, in fact, make me dead. But, alas, I persist, albeit in a modified incarnation.
It went down like this, chronologically:
1) When I was starting out on my own in 2016, I prepared some drawings for a new client. The client reviewed those drawings requested that I use different details in some spots. They sent me PDF copies of the details that they preferred which I recognized as surely being another firm's details. Let's call them Firm B.
2) I was working with contract drafter's all over the globe at that time and would have just sent the details off to one of those guys with the instruction to "make me a version of this that looks like my stuff". In retrospect, what likely happened at that point is this:
a) My drafter used a technique that I was unaware of by which they basically imported the PDF into CAD as a vectorized something or other. The end result has been that my details look ridiculously similar to Firm B's details.
b) Obviously, I failed to back check the details to ensure that my directions had been followed.
3) Last summer, the same client voiced some objections to some of the things that I was proposing on a project located where the environmental conditions were extreme relative to their "normal" projects. I didn't know it at the time but they got a second opinion on my drawings from firm Firm B who noticed that I'd stolen their details.
4) While I was on the road to Oregon to visit my wife's family for the first time in three years, I received a cease and desist letter from Firm B's lawyer. I read this on my phone, called the lawyer to see what it was all about, and then called my client to figure out the best path forward. I told my client that, in addition to the other issues with our active project, I now had to go back and modify the formatting of my drawings to comply with the cease and desist order which would take some time. In the end, we agreed to just have Firm B take over the project with me taking a complete financial loss on it. In my mind, I had "ceased and desisted".
5) We embarked upon the Oregon trip when international COVID restrictions where wildly in flux. We botched it. I got turned back at the Idaho border crossing and had to send my wife and daughter on without me in tears (both are US citizens). I had to hitchhike from Idaho back up to the nearest town with an airport in rural British Columbia. Unfortunately, I accidentally left my laptop in the car with my family and it went to Oregon without me.
6) It took me a solid 72HR to get home from the Idaho border. While I'd thought that I'd "ceased and desisted", apparently the letter that I'd read on my phone instructed me in a post script that they wanted a response in writing within 48 HRS. I failed on that count and, when I finally made it home, found some nasty emails from Firm B in my inbox to the tune of "Hey asshole, stop dodging our lawyer's messages or we'll see you in court! Where did you manage to steal our Revit file from anyhow?". I never had Firm B's digital files but, because my details where such great copies of theirs, I don't think that they believed that. They were clearly trying to get me to admit to stealing their proprietary digital files so that I could be summarily burned at the stake.
Every twitchy fiber of my being wanted to drive down to Firm B's head office and visit some violence upon them. I didn't, though, because:
a) That would not have served my best interests in the long term.
b) I've got some pretty fragile dental work these days.
c) I'm the bad guy in this story, truly.
I basically told Firm B, copying their lawyer that:
d) I reached out to their lawyer within an hour of receiving her letter without even engaging my own council first.
e) I would have been happy to discuss the matter over the phone, or in person, like gentleman, if they'd only contacted me about it prior to lawyering up. But, now that they had lawyered up, I thought it best to keep all of our communications running through their lawyer.
f) I subtly implied that I was starting to feel harassed. I suspect that Firm B's lawyer picked up on that and I heard nothing more directly from Firm B.
7) I called Firm B's lawyer and explained how intellectual property works in our space. I said that I could, and would, modify my work such that it would bear little stylistic resemblance to Firm B's. At the same time, I made it clear that I wasn't going to stop nailing boards to other boards, bolting sill plates to foundation walls, etc. The formatting belonged to Firm B but the technical content was industry public domain as far as I was concerned. I said that I would be happy to sign off on the cease and desist order so long as we shared that understanding. Firm B's lawyer agreed that would be sufficient. My impression was that the lawyer thought that the whole thing was a frivolous posturing effort from the get go.
8) Firm B rejected my acceptance of the cease and desist order and said that they would take me to court unless I told them who I got their digital files from. I said that I wouldn't do that because I didn't have their digital files and, therefore, couldn't do that even if I wanted to.
9) Firm B rejected my acceptance of the cease and desist order a second time and said that they would take me to court unless I told them who I got their PDF files from. I said that I would not do that, as a matter of choice, and would be prepared to thus participate in any court proceedings. This was all pretty odd in that, if I had told Firm B where I'd gotten their stuff from, they would then have had to pursue their own client in order to do something about that.
10) I sent Firm B's lawyer a carefully crafted email subtly conveying:
a) The extremely difficult to disprove story that I would be telling in a courtroom were I forced to find myself in one.
b) That I was considering countersuing for the costs that I had accrued and expected to accrue a as result of what I was beginning to view as Firm B's harassment of me.
That was the end of it. All tolled, I doubt that I spent more than 6HRS working on the issue. Unfortunately, the mental and emotional toll that this took on me was probably closer to 160 HRS. I'm still suffering the fallout from that "dark period". The truth of the matter is that I really was not very concerned about losing the project, losing my client, losing money, or even losing my business. I was concerned about losing my integrity. Like dik, I take my integrity pretty seriously. I feel that I work hard at my craft and that I make a concerted effort to give back to the profession (mostly here). Although I don't feel as though I was guilty of any high crime other than poor quality control, in my heart there's still a nagging voice telling me that I'm now the kind thieving shit that receives cease and desist orders. That was never who I wanted to be when I got started.
I don't mind folks here disagreeing with my ideas. In fact, I relish that. That said, our ideas are avatars for our selves, particularly here where our ideas are really all that we know of one another. To attack the quality of a man's ideas is, indirectly, to attack the quality of the man. It is for that reason that I feel that one should choose their adjectives carefully when challenging another's contributions here. I challenge people's ideas here regularly, probably more than anyone else. But you don't often hear me overtly discounting the value of other people's ideas. That, because:
a) It is never a certainty that I'm correct.
b) I never know all of the details of someone else's story.
c) It is respect and civility that make meaningful discourse viable.
And yes, I do realize that I may be inviting additional legal trouble by sharing this in as much detail as I have. I'll risk it.
