In Preston Wood v. RZ Enterprises, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) brought the house down.
Architectural firm Preston Wood entered into an agreement with real estate developer RZ Enterprises in which Preston Wood produced architectural plans for a multi-building residential development. Then, much to Preston Wood’s chagrin, RZ Enterprises used a different architect.
They not only allegedly used the plans, but the real estate developer sent them around to prospective residents in emails — with the name of the architect/author and other “Copyright Management Information” (CMI) deleted. The same information that is required by the DMCA to avoid damages.
That’s turned out to be a very significant deletion because the jury had found that the Defendant real estate developer sent no less than 11,516 emails containing these infringing, identical works..
The range of statutory damages that a judge can award for copyright infringement starts at $75 and goes up to $10,000 (for non-willful infringement) for each work that was infringed. So, that would be the one set of architectural drawings. However, each violation of the DMCA requires paying a minimum of $2,500. So in this case, the minimum amount of damages multiplied by each instance of infringement, adds up to over $28 million.
The opinion that just came out was merely affirming that (a) the statutory damages that had been based on the jury’s finding, and (b) the presumption that the jury was following the judge’s instructions.
If RZ Enterprises had not deleted the CMI from the plans it sent out, it still would have been copyright infringement — but it would just be infringement of the number of plans used. It would not be infringement for each email containing the plans. That’s a substantial verdict, even for a presumably “deep pocket” real estate developer, and certainly wasn’t in the budget for this project.
