Good afternoon and welcome to the American Institute of Building Design's Tuesdays at two presentation. The AIBD is a nonprofit association dedicated to the enhancement development and recognition of the residential and light commercial building design professional. Today's presentation is a part of the Institute's continuous quest.

To provide relevant information to those who are currently practicing or simply just interested in the building design disciplines. For those who intend to submit use, you will receive a follow-up email and it'll include a link to a digital certificate. You can just click on the my certificate URL in that email.

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But if your name's that long, we probably know who you are. So don't worry about it. And of course, the comments expressed in today's presentation are those of the participants and not necessarily of the American Institute of Building Design. Now that we're through all that stuff, we get to the fun part.

This presentation is Fundamentals of Copyright Law for the Building Designer, and it's presented by Louis k Bonum. Louis, it is all yours. Take it away. Thank you GE Garrett. Again I'm Louis Bonum and I'm with the firm of O Liang. A firm is based in Houston and I have an office there, but I live and do most of my work out of Austin when I'm not on the road on these kind of cases.

I've been doing architectural copyright law since the early nineties, right after they changed the statute and it's now. It's been over 95% of my docket for probably the last 20 plus years. This is a fascinating area of law, and what I want to do today is to give you. Essentially a quick berlitz course to be able to spot some of the common issues.

It's not to turn you into an expert on copyright law, it's to where you can recognize what the issues are and to know when it's time to call. The attorney or to at least know what not to do in some circumstances. Now, having said that, I have to give the usual admonition I am teaching today. I am not giving you legal advice.

If you need legal advice, you need to engage an attorney to give you advice, and you don't wanna be asking questions or having him give you advice with 40 other people on the line because that blows the privilege. Having said that, I encourage questions. I want to take this to the areas where you're interested and the things that are important to you.

So anytime if there is something that you want to ask go ahead and chat with Gar and he can forward it to me and I'll take the the conversation in whatever direction we want to go. Do feel free to do that. When I do these live. I really encourage people to raise their hand and we'll go off a little more restrictive here, but we'll get it done.

Okay with that, what are we gonna talk about today? If I can get my mouse onto the right screen. There we go. Okay. Outline we're gonna cover today, we're gonna talk about an overview of copyright law. We're gonna focus primarily on copyright infringement and remedies for it, because that's where the rubber meets the road.

In terms of protecting, your work product. From this as a case study I'm gonna go through a case I tried several years ago. Hewlett Custom Home design versus Frontier Builders, because it's a very good example of how these cases can play out in trial and some of the issues and how those were resolved.

We're gonna talk a little bit about some current trends in the law, some troubling, some encouraging and then as always, I'll give you some practice pointers some things to be thinking about that you can, take home and use in your daily practice.