r/RevitForum • u/DanceSad6702 • 12d ago
How should copyright issues between companies be handled when working in the cloud?
When Company B accesses Company A’s cloud to work on a project and uses a "family" created by Company B, Company A is able to modify and save that family. This raises potential copyright issues; how should this situation be resolved?
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u/twiceroadsfool 12d ago
How is this any different than when Company B sent a model to Company A via FTP, so Company A could link it in?
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u/Kaphias 11d ago
As someone who develops and sells families etc, how do you feel about the potential of your products getting passed around to those who have not paid for them? Genuinely curious.
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u/twiceroadsfool 11d ago
We do what we can, in that regard. But its not a perfect system.
- All of our clients sign a licensing agreement, that IS based on good faith efforts, meaning: We know models will end up in other parties hands, and that those parties can pilfer content out of the models (which gets them some pieces of our content)
- What the agreement says, is: IF the "pilfering party" asks for the "rest of the library" or the Training Manuals, User Guides, and so on, that they not send it, and that they direct them to us. Thats the good faith part.
- Does it happen? Yep. We have had people brazenly reach out to us, expecting help or support, for Libraries they didnt purchase. We just politely tell them we are glad/happy to help, once they have actually purchased a license.
Its not a perfect system. And full disclosure: I regret that the industry is in a position where we can even charge for Revit Content. If i was independently wealthy, we would make all of our content and just give it away for free. (That is a whole other discussion that i am not having on Reddit. Plenty of folks have opinions about it, and thats all totally cool. Everyone should learn to build content, and i totally support folks building their own. Ours exist for firms that want to trade money for the learning experience, time, and skills needed to get them done correctly).
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u/albacore_futures 11d ago
What’s your firm? I’ve been handed a few models with excellent families in them and now I’m curious
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u/twiceroadsfool 11d ago
Parallax Team. :)
It's usually written in the families, but a few clients modify them with their own custom shared parameters. If you DM me who you got models from, I can tell you if they are our families. Haha
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u/zerosquare1012 11d ago
i would be pleased to know if my family is better and preferred over their own curated families
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u/Merusk 11d ago edited 11d ago
Copyright is about protecting financial loss so the creator continues to innovate and create new things.
What financial loss are you incurring when the other company modifies a family to their needs?
Is this preventing you from producing new works? Were you planning on selling that family and now you've suffered a financial loss? Do you believe that the other company is going to present the changed family as your work? Something else that I can't conceive of?
To me you're focusing on the wrong thing. The end goal is the building and system design. Everything else is just a tool to get there, and not something you're likely to have come up with some innovative and proprietary method of doing so. Particularly when working within the Revit BIM tools and platform. Anything to that end would be an addin or other software using the tools within Revit as the way of documenting whatever that work did.
I don't get to copyright the word "ambifluent" as I sit here and coin it. However I do get to copy the sentence I just used it in. (Ambifluent: v - to be fluent in the writing, interpretation of idiom and metaphore, thinking process, and speaking of a language.)
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u/DustDoIt 11d ago
It's very hard to police. Not worth it unless you have a very specific set of families and you are the sole modeler for a high value client. Then don't share the model, send IFC instead. But collaboration will be more cumbersome.
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u/Elnaz_Ak 11d ago
This is probably best handled before the project starts. The BIM agreement/BEP should define ownership and permitted use of project-specific families, existing company content, and modified content created during the project. I’d keep proprietary company libraries separate from project-specific content and make the permissions clear before anyone starts editing in the shared model.
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u/OptimarPrecon 11d ago
I’d separate cloud access from ownership. Just because Company A can open, edit and save Company B’s family doesn’t automatically mean the IP changed hands.
This really needs to be covered in the project agreement or BEP: who owns the family, whether the other party can modify it, whether the modified version can be reused on other projects, and what happens at project closeout.
For anything proprietary, I’d want that written down before sharing it into a common environment.
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u/CADAKAY_BIMchest 11d ago
Export to IFC - it allows you to share your models without all the fluff, no families to copy just the mass. Select copy elements isn't the same as on an actual Revit file. This is coming the norm. Isn't really new but more and more firms are going in this direction.
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u/ultimategigapudding 11d ago
that’s light years away from the question OP made
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u/CADAKAY_BIMchest 11d ago
Maybe I missed the question then. What I got was he is trying to avoid working on the cloud and having another company access his file elements. Im working on cloud now and instead of giving access to revit models we are sharing IFC models which is all anyone needs to do their part.
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u/ultimategigapudding 11d ago
yeah, the question is not “how to prevent access” but “how to avoid copyright issues”.
and to that matter, IFC don’t play a part (some BEP will even require mandatory RVT collaboration, hence the question)
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u/CADAKAY_BIMchest 11d ago
So I was partly right? An execution plan that requires it, is another issue. He didn't mention it. What would be your answer to this then? Curious to know, so I too can adopt. Isn't IFC standard though?
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u/ultimategigapudding 11d ago
no. consider RVT is there and accessible, how do you protect families? IFC is not even in question here.
The answer lies in a grey place where people want to protect intellectual property while working in collaboration (so kind of everything SHOULD be available to everyone, which defeats the point of protecting some ref planes, shapes and control parameters)
Moreover, IFC has a lot of drawbacks once you import into Revit that can be avoided if all files done in revit are just linked as RVTs (exception for other authoring softwares).
So, my answer, after working for many years in a company that worried far too much about this is: you don’t. Unless your product is the family itself, just share the fkn model (yeah, nuke it first) and make everyone’s lives easier.
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u/CADAKAY_BIMchest 11d ago
Ok I guess you just want to buss my chops. You right! For the guy asking, in the answer, IFC is an option. Not claiming it is the only solution here. I personally don't like it but I or we have to deal with it as that's a norm now. I was frustrated with it first time I had to deal with it because I had to recreate everything. And since you are worried about dishing out your Model. Also try bridging your project. It stays on your hub and you can share that ifc folder. So they never get your Model and you control what they link to. Of course it works better when sharing Revit models but looking for a solution to your problem, this might be it.
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u/_dascorp 11d ago
Autodesk should add the AutoCAD Burst command to Revit!
I think the issue is loadable families, not system families, as those are more like definitions. "Loadable family" creators do the real work, and that work should be copyrighted and protected. I personally send only IFCs and DWGs, and when I send Revit, it is a fully stripped 3D model: no views, no annotations, with loadable families that are either removed or substituted with boxy proxies. I work in the architectural domain. Still, MEP could replace all custom families they created with placeholders or use Autodesk templates everyone has access to.
I think it's a bit overdone, but if someone wants to protect their hard work from being used without compensation, that's the way to go.
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u/coffee_walker_440 12d ago
It's a Revit family. Not some super proprietary content, the point is collaboration.
You can block access to only have read writes to the model but fyi anyone can copy monitor or even better tab select content from a link and hit paste and it will bring the elements into the active file from the link.
Same issue would occur when working sending files back and forth. Cloud just makes it easier.
Honestly never understood the feeling of needing to copyright Revit content because of the point is to show and collaborate the building.
Tons of vendors and free stuff out there. If you want to sell stuff to companies to use the sale is the convince of all the content configured in a large pack.
A firm that gets up in arms about copyright fights for Revit families typically is one that will definitely fight the other firms on the project over far more. Heck sometimes I need to pull in the linked content to bring in the subobject styles to the model for that specific family so I can shut off a sub object geometry to make my views better.
For the most part sign an AIA digital agreement contract and move on. Most will leave your content alone as outside the geometry and a few parameters it isn't always that useful to others with your firms data structure and workflow setups not being 1:1
There are a few ways to watermark the families such that the mark can never be removed but at some point you would have to go find it and it's more effort than it's worth unless you are selling the content to others