Original ideas are property to be protected

It was their fifth design meeting. The kitchen remodel drawings and job schedule had been fine-tuned, so they figured this would be their final meeting – where they’d sign the contract and begin what was going to be a great project.

Lots of detail, innovative touches and such a great relationship between them made it feel more like collaboration than a job. Suffice it to say, the client and designer had their hearts and souls in this.

They sat at the kitchen table and studied the old kitchen with anticipation, both knowing this was it. The client asked to take the drawings and all supporting documents downstairs to show a friend.

“No problem,” the designer said.

So the client took the hours and hours of paperwork and headed down as the designer sat thinking about the coming months and how incredible the final pictures would look in her portfolio.

She then heard a familiar sound: a photo copier. She had forgotten that her client’s basement office was fully equipped. He had not yet signed a contract and he was taking copies of her work. These were her drawings, not his, so in the eyes of the designer, he was stealing her intellectual property.

She sat in the kitchen listening to the machine go, feeling betrayed and angry. Perhaps he was just copying something else and she was simply being paranoid.

The designer was me, 20-plus years ago when I was in the remodeling business, and the scenario reflects the first time I faced this sort of ethical challenge. Over the years, I have experienced similar situations. In fact, the remnants of such an issue met me when I arrived in Spokane in 1998.

KHQ approached the Better Business Bureau about a co-op advertising program that our former BBB CEO liked. However, wanting to be inclusive and neutral, he also took the idea to the other two local stations asking what kind of offer they could make the BBB.

While I understand why our former CEO did this, the first thing Lon Lee, former general manager of KHQ, told me when I met him was that we had “shopped his idea,” inevitably handing it to another station. Ouch.

Long ago in that kitchen, I learned about the ethics of intellectual property and how one needs to be careful about the possibility of taking someone else’s idea without paying them. If you sell ideas, you risk this kind of problem every time you meet a potential client.

I have a friend who sells ideas. He meets with clients, gets to know their needs and challenges, and comes back to them with helpful suggestions and a proposal. I was once privy to the details of one such meeting, and was surprised to see that one potential client had taken his ideas and used them in the marketplace without ever hiring my friend.

How does a person “lifting ideas” and not paying for them rationalize doing so? What makes this kind of behavior acceptable?

Short of cluttering your proposals with a variety of disclaimers and legal threats, what can you do to protect your intellectual ideas? Here’s what I suggest: Talk about it. Get the issues on the table right when you present your ideas. Let your client know that while you have no presumptions that they would ever have such an ethical slip, it happens, so you just want to be upfront that if they use your ideas, you will expect payment and present a fee for the services.

Offer only enough information to let the client see the potential, not the end result. Not always possible, I know, but purposefully leaving out a couple of important points might make it a bit more difficult for them to grasp the whole picture.

If these tips make them think before taking your intellectual property, you may achieve your goal of protecting your ideas.

If you find a potential client is using your ideas, call them on it. By saying nothing, they might never understand they broke your trust.

So what did that young woman in the kitchen do when faced with the noise of the copier?

Nothing. I just sat and waited for him to come back upstairs. When he did, I acted as though I didn’t suspect a thing and went on to hopefully close the sale. But he said he wanted to wait and that he would contact me later in the week. He never did and stopped returning my calls. Eventually, I saw a photo of his kitchen completed by a less expensive competitor. While it was not exactly done to the specifications of my drawings, the sketches were mine. Then the competitor entered it into a remodel contest.

As for the ethics of my competitor, well, that is the topic of a whole other column.