How can you prove you redrew an original drawing?

[Anonymous]

I have what may be a unique situation.  Our firm was hired by the city to produce drawings for a project involving another client.  A legal dispute between the city and client has arisen preventing the client from reusing those drawings, so we'll need to reproduce them from scratch.  The problem is, how do we prove we didn't just copy the old drawings and not redraw them?

I'm looking for a legitimate way of addressing this so our firm doesn't fall into legal jeopardy if the city claims we reused "their" drawings instead of redrew them.  Any thoughts would be much appreciated.  I presume if I draw from scratch using the same layering and dimensions, I'll wind up with new drawings identical to the old ones, thus the potential for a legal problem...

[pendean]

Unless you draw by hand on paper on a drafting table, electronic CAD (and scanning/conversion tools) make this impossible to easily and legally identify.

Time to hire a 3rd party approved by all parties to validate your work through all phases on your drafting project.

[Patchy]

Time command might help determine the time you made your drawing.

[Patchy]

and if they say you reused their drawings, list any element (F2) and see the handle, redraw would have different handle.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately I get a new handle with cutting and pasting from the original to a new drawing too.

[Anonymous]

Time establishes the last edit, but doesn't determine whether the edit was redrawn or copy/pasted in.

[Patchy]

They were mad because you reused their drawings, but you copy and paste is a shortcut way to get things done. I guess next time you charge them extra for starting from scratch.

[kcobabe · Accepted solution]

I would probably just implement a timeline save for the job.  Basically you do what a time auditing software did when I worked for a sub that did stuff for boeing.  Instead of a autosave you got another drawing save with a timestamp at the end of the file name.  You can do this at whatever increment you would like, but the company I worked for had it set to every hour.

[3wood]

I think it is not only the drafting work they concern, but also the content of the drawings. If we can product new drawings without any reference to their original drawings, it wouldn't be any problem. Otherwise we still "copy" the content of the drawing for commercial usage no matter it is electronicaly or manually.

[RAFUSE]

Best be very carefull as you could easily get in legal trouble.

Suggest you seek legal consul.  Also check with the state's licensing board.

RC

[steven-g]

Do you have logfiles enabled, that keeps a log of every command you issue within a drawing, it does this for every drawing you have open and creates a new logfile each time you open a drawing. But I doubt it would be seen as legal proof.

[jggerth]

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@RAFUSE wrote:

Best be very carefull as you could easily get in legal trouble.

Suggest you seek legal consul.  Also check with the state's licensing board.

RC

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This.  No one here claims to be an expert on legalities, or has a license to practice law.

State board regs _may_ give you an out....  especially if you are completing a job started by a different organization.  IIRC Florida has specific language that addresses that scenario.  but talk to your attorneys.  

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Time stamping in short increments seems to be the best solution, and Dean's advice to hire an agreeable 3rd  party to oversee the process is probably a prudent idea too.  At least with time stamping we can demonstrate step by step the redrafting process if necessary.  The City and our client are still hashing things out, so we'll see what happens.  Anyway, thanks again to all.

[Anonymous]

You might find my CadTempo program useful for logging time involvement and easily creating reports. it was just recently added to the Autodesk Exchange and currently is a featured new app. Autodesk Exchange - CadTempo