Control of intellectual property

[D Wood]

I have been asked by a builder who is tendering (bidding) on a house that I have designed to email him my drawings as .pdf's so he can farm them out to his subcontractors for pricing.

The house is to be built in another part of the country, so dropping by to pick up a set of documents is not possible. He obviously wants to avoid printing costs, and it may be an innocent request but I am concerned about having my intellectual property out there in digital form, it would be easy to reproduce and on-sell to someone else and I would never know.

How would you respond or how have you responded to this?

[Ray Libby]

Password protect the PDF so it can't be altered. Even if you gave him prints he could scan and duplicate it.

[Robert Anderson]

Also, you should have a copyright legend on each sheet, if you don't already.

[Kevin McAllister]

When I was working on the Olympics, we had specific practices in place for tracking digital design documents. Two suggestions that may help in your case:

- make up a basic drawing release form and have him sign it before sending the files. It would basically state that the intellectual property is yours and that you are releasing it for a specific purpose (ie. tendering). You don't need to make a big deal, just state its standard company practice.

- use the watermark feature of the full version of Acrobat to custom watermark drawing sets for individual contractors who are tendering. It only takes a minute to do but allows you to track an individual PDF back to its owner if there are problems later on. We made the watermark quite large but mostly transparent, placing it diagonally across the page, and used the individual/company name and the date as the watermark.

Kevin

[islandmon]

One other option to explore:

If the files are posted to your server with a secure User certificate required for downloading, then you can assign privileges and track processes.

If legal recourse is require, then your server logs will provide the necessary verification that said User accessed your file system via password authentication on said date, and then downloaded said files prior to selling them on eBay.