Revit & "Intellectual property"

[enslin]

Hi Guys,

I wonder if you can help with some advise...

Our company has spent a lot of time,money & effort to develop our Revit Template & office standards into something realy amazing. We have fine tuned Revit into the finest details to ensure we get maximum production & quality out of Revit.

In some cases we only do stage 1 & 2 for our clients, they will then go to another Architecrual company to do the rest of the work.


This has never been a problem prior to Revit,but if we hand over the project, we do not only give away all our families we created, but we give away all the we have developed.

Like our view templates,all graphical settings....even our materials have been developed to make material "take-off" a breeze.

Any ideas on how to give a Revit Project file without giving all our office standards away?

Kind regards

EJ

[RobertB]

There is no way to protect your IP beyond what is written in the contracts. Revit itself has no way to "protect" such content. Nor would it be appropriate in a BIM. After all, if you could "dumb down" the content so that it isn't "useful" it probably isn't a BIM anymore.

However, I do wish that Autodesk would provide a mechanism to permamently "stamp" content with a copyright.

[enslin]

Hi Robert,

Good point, you are right....it wouldn’t be BIM if we had to strip the intelligence.

I agree with you, the next best thing would be to at least ensure your digital work cannot be "stolen" with a change of a Titleblock.

Look I am great believer of us as a Revit community growing with the software to become leaders in our industry with market leading solutions.

I do find it difficult to share our work with "spongers"...guys that don’t send staff on proper training, that wont pay for implementation & basically just look to feed off others.

Anyway, such is life...as we said, not much we can do about it.

Thanx for your post

[Craig_L]

Revit requires a "shift" in thinking in more ways than just when you model and BIM a project.

Leaders, and contract document writers need to think outside the box.

Just the same way as you had to alter your contracts to include BIM costs and modifications and scope/limitations on a project, you should include new clauses regarding copyright and intellectual property, and what the model is intended for.

You could always supply only a DWF, but this will lose some of the intelligence when shipping it off to your sub-consultants. If this isn't an issue, perhaps think about what format you will share your model.

Secondly, your formats and standards you have spent time working on, are not going to suit every office. People might take some of your content, but it's more than likely they will have to spend at least a little time altering it to suit their office, in which case, it becomes their own work anyways. Essentially you have taken something initially, programmed by someone else, and made it work to your company standards. Autodesk truly owns the 'content' even though what you have made is non-standard, it's still utilising Autodesk software and coding, without which you couldn't have made the family/template etc in the first place. If you understand what I am getting at here??

There really is no way to protect this content you have created, essentially most users wont know how to manipulate most families, a select few will and will pilfer and profit.
If you are truly concerned about it, perhaps include a price in the contract fee that includes a cost of the other company purchasing rights to access the families and their properties, this way you cover some of your creation costs.

[Daniel Marais]

Essentially I think that if you create your model with work-sets that are "editable to none" then no-one can can use what is in your model, except for viewing purposes and they can essentially only work "over" everything in your model, thus making whatever views, details and standards you have inevitable to those using your model.

[sgermano]

Hi Gents- We are working on a watermarking program to be released soon, but any watermarking program cannot stop people from taking your families and using them. With watermarking you would have legal grounds to prove in court that someone took your IP.

BUT I agree with what was said above, BIM is a new paradigm shift in mentality and the manufacturer content is starting to get really good, someday you may not need generic content except for certain families. This has been a hot topic with the factory, but I dont see it being a high priority for them.

[pauljordan]

I think it all goes back to the wording in your contract. Don't give up the models until you finish the full extent of your project and the redlines are done.

Otherwise, I would think flat drawings plotted out would do just fine. If they need 3D files, give them the 3D DWF's as mentioned earlier. You might even go as far as only giving them Navisworks .nwd files for thier use.

[tabest]

I prefer to make any one who takes my families/projects life a living .... To do this, I've placed an acronym for our company, and example would be AEC. I put this at the beginning of every parameter, type, and family, thus AEC Receptacle, AEC Duplex, AEC Annotation Symbol... I also provide a link to our company's website, and a place to store our company's name.

Long story short, it will take them almost more effort to remove my markings, than to have just created the family in the first place.

GL, and make any theif's life miserable too!