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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

One regrettable thing that seems to happen here a lot is that pedants will swarm to address some relatively irrelevant misunderstanding made in a genuine question relevant to the article without ever addressing the question being asked.

I think the commenter gets it, Christ for the fifth time now yes, there's a difference between copyright and trademark. You can't copyright a word, got it. Now that we have that bit of pedantry thoroughly out of the way, I have the exact same question as the one above:

>That is, say there is a plan on their site for a 2BD/2BA house, the floor plan is very simple and a builder that is unaware of this company ends up copying the floor plan for no other reason that it happens to be a very common floorplan. Could this company still pursue damages?

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Clean room reverse engineering is a valid protection against copyright claims. So as long as whoever drew the plans didn't know about the original they are safe. Even if the builder had a copy of their plans and gave whoever did the drawings leading instructions to get them to draw something similar to the original.

That's probably why they mass mail these plans to homebuilders, to make it harder to prove they didn't copy

So when you start up a home building company, first thing you do is have your IT guy set up a mail filter to block receiving anything from these arseholes. Order it in writing, and make sure IT guy notes it prominently in his work log.

> That is, say there is a plan on their site for a 2BD/2BA house, the floor plan is very simple and a builder that is unaware of this company ends up copying the floor plan for no other reason that it happens to be a very common floorplan. Could this company still pursue damages?

No. The ruling in this case actually covers this in detail: Proving copyright infringement is a two-step process, first you must prove that something was actually copied and then that the copied portion was substantial enough to constitute infringement. But the first part is a necessary precondition, without copying there's no infringement. They give the example of two comic book authors inventing a character called "Dennis the Menace" independently on the same day.

Floor plans are not copyrightable. The blueprint might be - but that includes things like "Joe's architecture services" which wouldn't be on your copy, and the dimension markings would be in different places (unless the placement is standardized in which case the placement is not creative and thus not copyrightable).

The floor plan is probably subject to patents. I don't think anyone has done this, but I don't see why it isn't possible.

The article (and I'm not sure how accurate this is) seems to be claiming the houses themselves are in violation of DesignBasics' copyrights:

>Now, with these simple, vague floor-plans (not full architectural drawings!) out there for everyone to see… they look for someone to actually build a house that has a similar layout, and then jump in with the lawsuit!

Are they just hoping every builder will settle out of court?

That's pretty much the business model. Cost of settling can be less than the cost of defending the suit.

Every case where someone with pockets deep enough, holds out and gets a judgment against the troll - especially with legal costs included - is a huge blow to their business. And a single case that doesn't go their way is often enough to shut down their business and poof.

Hope one of Design Basics's defendants is in a position to say Enough!

That's probably why floor plans are only for 4 BR or less homes. Middle class, upper middle class maybe. Most likely the kind of people without deep pockets.

More likely to be combinatorial scaling reasons, I would have thought

Could potentially be a design patent, given said plan has some form and specific function that is not obvious.

Potentially, but there are so many houses that it gets hard to find something that won't be laughed out of court.

Right! I agree, and really was just stating the only possibility I see.

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