Protect Your Copyright - Freedenfeld v. McTigue
It’s a good feeling when we’re able to show you just how important following through on protecting your rights can be… not to mention the smug satisfaction of being able to say we told you so.
Warren Freedenfeld Associates, Inc. v. McTigue D.V.M., which the South Carolina Construction Law Blog has posted on, is a case that should have design professionals thinking twice about doing anything with the ownership of their creations other than granting a limited license to an owner.
The architect was retained by a client and drafted plans for a veterinary clinic. The parties executed and AIA standard form agreement, likely the B151-1997 because the opinion references an Article 6 that deems the architect the author of the plans and drawings and this all took place in 1998.
The relationship went south over disputes about payment and budgeting. The architect sent the vet a letter warning that all the plans they had produced were proprietary and that no one could use them to complete the project and demanded return of the plans. The vet responded that the plans were useless and that they had been “rolled up and discarded.”
Shortly thereafter, the architect took the step securing a copyright over the plans by filing an application with the United States Copyright Office.
In September of 1999 the parties formally terminated their disputes over payment with a written Termination Agreement and the agreement stipulated that Article 6 remained in full force and effect. The agreement also said that neither the vet nor his proposed hospital would use any of the work solely produced by the architect.
The vet hired a different architect to complete the hospital and in June of 2000, the veterinary hospital opened for business.
In 2004, the architect came across an article in Veterinary Economics featuring a drawing of the floor plan of the veterinary hospital at issue… and that the design had won a merit award. The architect went to city hall and got a copy of the building plans and concluded that his copyright had been violated.
In September of 2005, the architect filed suit in federal court against the hospital, the vet and several other parties alleging copyright infringement and other violations.
The defendants moved to dismiss based on the three-year statute of limitations contained in the copyright act. The district court granted the motion to dismiss ruling that any reasonably diligent person would have learned of the copyright infringement when the hospital opened, so the copyright claim’s three-year statute of limitations ran from that date in June of 2000. The architect appealed.
The appellate court analyzed the lower court’s determination about when a reasonable person would have been aware of the infringement and found that the availability of the plans on file and the fact that the hospital was open for a time did not amount to notice that would start the limitations clock:
“Architects have no general, free-standing duty to comb through public records or to visit project sites in order to police their copyrights.”
The court held that the record in front of them did not compel a finding that the architect had not been vigilant or that the architect had been on notice since 2000 and reversed the dismissal of the copyright claim.
The architect now has the ability to prosecute his copyright claim and if he prevails, he may ask for his attorney's fees as well. For the small cost of filing the copyright he gained this added protection… not to mention, since he retained the rights to the plans, he had the ability to request them when something went south on the project… in Illinois, if one adds these remedies to the contractor prompt payment act and the mechanics lien act - a design professional’s ability to obtain payment is drastically strengthened.
The case went to trial on June 29. The jury agreed with the district court that the matter was time barred