Hi everyone,
My company is attempting to implement BIM (initially starting with Revit only) and attempting to understand how a company can retain/assert ownership of components. We have one team that works almost exclusively on prison scemes. Due to the consistent approach required from one prison to the next, a lot of the families (secure doors, windows etc) are identical from one prison to the next. For this reason a lot of work has gone into making some of these families by our company. However, we've been down this road with AutoCAD in the past, we created a lot of usefull and efficient parametric families and used them to complete a number of jobs. Other companies then started undercutting our bids of prisons and we started losing work. It was only later we found that the prisons service had sent the companies undercutting us, all our work & blocks etc to use in their own drawings. The worry is that the same will happen again with Revit families, and more than a few people in my company are balking at the idea of creating the rest of the families we need, just to find them being effectively stolen by other companies.
Are there any hidden parameters that can be applied inside the Revit environment, or attached to the family's files themselves, where we can assert our ownership of these families? It may not stop the families appearing in other companies work in the future. But at least we will be able to identify that they are using paraments that our company's intellectual property.
I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure this is the correct approach our company should be attempting to implement. It seems to go against the grain of the collaboration efforts the BIM environment seems to be trying to encourage. But I've been asked to find out anything I can regarding this topic by people higher up in my company's structure. Yet at the same time I can clearly see that going against the grain may be prefereable, if the alternative is making the collaboration efforts much easier to the people who are unbidding us for jobs using our own families as a means to do it.
How are other companies dealing with this pottential problem. Is it a hardwired option, like applying attributes to files? Or is it more a legal problem, where we have a contract clearly stating our intelectual property is not to be passed on to third parties? Or is it just accepted that once the family is out the door, it's fair game for anyone who can get their hands on it?
Thanks,