Austin architecture firm accuses San Antonio builders of copyright infringement on homes’ design
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An Austin company has filed a new lawsuit alleging that the architectural design of some of the homes being built on a distant West Side infringes its copyright laws.
Kipp Flores Architects LLC filed the lawsuit in San Antonio Federal Court last week against Pradera SFR LLC, American Housing Ventures LLC and KTGY Group LLC.
Pradera SFR and American Housing Ventures (AHV) have teamed up to build Pradera, a single family home community of 250 units at 11631 Culebra Road.
Kipp Flores said in his complaint that 138 three bedroom, 2½ bath homes known as the “bluebonnet” design violate his exclusive rights to reproduce and create derivatives of his copyrighted works.
Each of the defendants is liable to Kipp Flores for their own profits, the lawsuit says.
The 1,555-square-foot homes that are the subject of the lawsuit rent $ 2,144 to $ 2,174 per month, according to Pradera’s website.
“The lawsuit is a surprise,” said Austin’s attorney James G. Ruiz, who represents the AHV. “Based on our documents, Pradera SFR signed a design license agreement with Kipp Flores Architects on August 24, 2017, which covered the entire project.”
Pradera SFR and KTGY, both based in California, didn’t respond to a request for comment on Monday.
In 2016, according to the lawsuit, the AHV signed a license agreement to use some of Kipp Flores’ copyrighted works in housing developments in Pflugerville and Georgetown near Austin.
An Austin architectural firm claims that the concepts used for some of the homes in Pradera, a community of 250 single-family homes on the far West Side, infringe the company’s copyrights.
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Kipp Flores’ design for a furnishing center was later used in Pradera, the lawsuit states, but the parties never reached an agreement on licensing the company’s residential designs.
Company partner Sabas Flores sent a proposed license agreement at the end of 2017, but an AHV builder replied that the builders had hired another architectural firm.
Kipp Flores claims that his copyrighted works were distributed to KTGY by AHV and / or Pradera SFR.
“To the best of their knowledge and belief, AHV and / or Pradera have instructed SFR KTGY to redraw the copyrighted works with certain changes to create the ‘bluebonnet’ design,” the lawsuit said.
San Antonio attorney Ted Lee specializes in intellectual property.
“For something to be copyright infringement, it has to be a material copy of the copyrighted work,” said Lee, who is not part of the dispute. “You have different courts that have different views of what a substantial copy is.”
Lee expects the defendants to argue that the Bluebonnet design is “no longer an essential copy of the copyrighted work.”
Kipp Flores says in his lawsuit that he is entitled to an injunction prohibiting defendants from further infringing copyrights, including further rentals or sales of the Bluebonnet properties in Pradera.
Kipp Flores has been successful in pursuing other copyright infringement proceedings against builders.
In 2013, the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a $ 3.2 million award given to Kipp Flores against Houston’s Hallmark Design Homes. A federal jury found in 2012 that Hallmark Design Homes had committed a copyright infringement by building hundreds of homes from architectural designs copyrighted by Kipp Flores, Architecture Magazine reported.
A federal jury in Virginia ordered two construction companies to pay Kipp Flores $ 5.25 million in 2001, the magazine added.
pdanner@express-news.net
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