How to mark a drawing to prove you created it
Our company had a situation where a customer decided to dismiss us as their engineering firm, but used our drawing to obtain a building permit. Our contract clearly states that if they decided to not pay for our design work, that they can't use the designs we submitted to them. So, a lawsuit is in our near future. In this case, an acquaintance of one of our engineers actually ran into the customer, and saw that our title block was on the drawings, and had assumed we were doing the project. So, we got word of their usage of our drawings.
I imagine that the judge would want to know who produced the original DWG file. That got me thinking that it might be good to somehow "watermark" a DWG, so that we can prove that we were the original source of the drawings, even if they remove the title block.
I know that student versions of AutoCAD have a way to propagate their "water mark". In fact it operated almost like a virus, in that if you brought ANY object from a student version drawing into a regular drawing, that drawing was transformed into a student version, which would always print with the words "student version" on it.
There is stuff that can be added to entities, as extended entity data. Would that survive a cut-and paste into a new drawing, or if the original drawing were inserted into another drawing?
-Joe
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@Joe Dunfee
That is an interesting issue, as a programmer will know how to remove any xrecord data you add to the dwg.
I would not recommend trying to tag visible entities, that is doomed to fail.
In our startup (acaddoc.lsp), it runs a function to store the user name, date, description of action (opened) and drawing size.
I can then read that in future to see a history.
My tool takes any list, serializes to a string, and stores in the dwg dictionary.
You could nuke that in one line of code if you looked at the dwg dictionary.So how to make it transfer like a virus and unremovable?
I bet @Owen Wengerd is listening and chuckling at my childs play method of storing info.
He will certainly have a better method, though he might not be able to say as its likely IP to a company he worked at.Note that registered app ids do act like viruses in this way. You can purge those easily though, and they jump so aggressively that finding a drawing with your name does not mean much. It could have jumped in from other files even unrelated to the project if people are wblocking things around.
thx0 -
@James Maeding said:
@Joe Dunfee
That is an interesting issue, as a programmer will know how to remove any xrecord data you add to the dwg.From my experience,
people who are so ignorant don't even care about trying to
hide evidence ....
("and saw that our title block was on the drawings,")0 -
It seems we have two threads running with a duplicate post from me. I kept getting error messages from the server at Bricsys, which said to try again later.
Anyway, I am sure I can't evade a highly knowledgeable user from successfully purging any watermark. And they could justify the expense of hiring an expert to purge such data, since the lawsuit would be well over $100,000. But, unless the offending customer knows that we used such a method, they won't know to purge it before it is submitted as evidence. So, the trick would only work once with that particular customer, but we are certainly unlikely to have them as a customer in the future.
-Joe
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This is very simplistic I know, but couldn’t one embed w/ in a very important block (or somewhere in the dwg) which is key to the dwg geometry, your company name etc. that would not show up as text that could be searched for & discovered? Scaled down to the size of a nanoparticle, so it was not visible unless zooming to .0000000x, or there about.
In 1994 I was tasked w/ doing hundreds of ladder logic diagrams for one of the major oil companies, which had stringent CAD Standards that required certain fonts, linetypes etc. Even though most of those fonts, linetypes etc. were not used in any of the ladder logic diagrams, we had to maintain those CAD Standards for all of their dwgs. Surely many reading this have “been there, done that”.
Back in 1994 size mattered, & PURGE was a very important command as anyone from that era can attest to.
To solve the inherent problem of purging every dwg & answering “yes/no” to each item to be purged (something like 26 times if I remember correctly), & of course screwing up now & again by answering “yes” when I meant “no”, & then having to fix that “pilot error”, I inserted into the oil company Title Block all the component parts of the CAD Standard items, scaled to the size of the head of a pin. So, unless someone was looking for it, they would never find it, as it became an integral part of the oil company TB. Which no one messed w/, except me of course.
As I got each set of dwgs, I immediately inserted my component “parts” w/in each TB, which only took a couple minutes, but that was much less time consuming & grieve some than messing w/ purge after each edit. And once done, it would not have to be done upon receipt of the same dwg again, it being an ongoing project.
Sorry this is so long, but hopefully someone will find a similar use; or not.
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@MDunn
Those are things all places run into the first year or two of using (x)cad.
Most people either have what you say off to the side, and then erase at end of project, or have a block they can insert to bring back purged stuff.
However, the methods you list to hide are not effective. I regularly clean out stuff like that in seconds when I want to.
The problem with acad is you can easily wblock all to a new drawing and leave behind the invsible things like dwg dictionary.
I'm still very interested in this topic, as if someone says how to solve it, they essentially revealing a dwg bug. We should be able to clean out what we want, and not have things collect.
thx0 -
I'm not saying that some quasi-secret watermark isn't useful, but if some drawing content significant enough to matter was copied or re-used, any competent forensics expert can reliably determine that two copies are related without any watermark. The most difficult part of enforcing your contract terms and copyright in these situations is not proving that you created it: it is proving that you own exclusive rights to what you created. For that a watermark won't help at all.
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right, seems like @Joe Dunfee 's problem is just showing the other company was not allowed to use them.
I'm thinking someone foolish enough to hijack plans not paid for is also not smart enough to make anyone think they did them.
That is tricky though. If someone else designs some pipeline in a location, and is not paid for it, am I stealing their work by designing another one in same location for same project?0 -
Our contract and log of extensive e-mail correspondence, with dwg attachments would be proof. And the drawings submitted for the permit was an obvious mistake. So, hopefully the lawsuit will be quickly done.
If they did such a blatant violation of the contract, they surely would have known that we would easily win in court, and it will cost them a lot more in the end. I would guess that they were short on cash at the time, and just hoping that we would not pursue it, or that it would get delayed enough that they would eventually have the money to deal with it.
We are actually finishing up another lawsuit about a non-paying customer, though in that case, whether or not they used our design is not an issue. And again, they should have known they had ZERO chance in court. Sometimes people are foolish, and sometimes they really expect to get away with it. Perhaps they hope that we would be financially stressed enough to not afford the lawyer to even sue. Though that proved to not be an issue, and he may get a big surprise in a few weeks when the Judge is asked to make final judgment.
-Joe
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Of course, we normally give out DWGs to customers, for the other contractors to use. Our company is now a lot more restrictive about when they give out DWGs. A contract and deposit has to be paid first, and the payments have to be kept more current with our expenses i they want the updated DWGs. Lesson learned.
-Joe
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@Joe Dunfee
That is tricky. We commonly need to give dwg to many parties during design. I guess not sheet files, but bases are the main info one would harvest.
That stinks someone misused your drawings. Hopefully they get more than 5 months in a Lompoc luxury jail.0 -
Concerning doing work & getting paid. Personally know of $15 million hard bid job, cost overrun by primary contractor of an additional $15 million, Judge: “do you have receipts for the additional $15 million”, Contractor: “yes”, Judge: “Pay the gentleman his additional $15 million.” Moral of the story, anything goes w/ some judges.
Joe, as an alternative consideration to James’ Lompoc luxury jail, & originally coming from Detroit, the same Detroit of Jimmy Hoffa fame; how about a vacation on Corsica & ask around for Guido, I hear he is pretty persuasive. Just a joke, in case someone is over stressed from all our collective insanity of the last 9 months. Been a hectic wk, need a laugh about now.0 -
The good news is that we seem to have a decent judge. But, of course, winning does not necessarily guarantee payment, if the customer has been juggling other debts. And the government's reaction to Covid-19 has hurt a great many businesses, so it is hard to say if the customer is solvent.
But if both this lawsuit, and the other one come to provide money , I should be getting a major computer and CAD software upgrade that has long been put-off. Though, I am certainly not one to upgrade every year. I'm still on v14, but it really is time to upgrade.
-joe
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Don't Forget Drawing Properties (on file menu) for the .dwg file. Hardly anyone is aware of them
Another good "key" for plots is a plot stamp with a field showing time, date, and company name. This takes care of paper copies.
ddk0
