The unregistered guest’s last sentence in his/her last post raises the important issue of copyright.
As participants in the knowledge economy, we often use and share information and documents to which we have very limited rights or none at all. Computers have made this very easy to do as the discussion here proves.
We should do our best to understand the basic principles of copyright and fair use and be aware of what use rights govern the information and documents we have at hand.
I expand on this in the Specifications column of the August 05 Construction Specifier. After it comes out, I welcome anyone to contribute their thoughts. I can be reached at info@wyattswords.com or djwyattsm@alltel.net.
We issue all documents (memos, reports, specifications and drawings) in PDF file format. Our audience includes lawyers, architects, contractors, internal customers, homeowners associations, etc.
If you are an AIA MasterSpec subscriber, MasterWorks includes a print utility to convert MS Word and WordPerfect files to PDF or locked PDF files for distribution.
All our bid and construction documents (specifications and drawings) include a copyright statement. It is located in the footer of specificaitons and in the titleblock of drawings. Some may say copyright statements have about the same power as the disclaimer on the back of a ski lift ticket.
For further reading on copyright infringement, the International Risk Management Institute is a good starting place. Look for the “Expert Commentary” section. Of particular interest is “Copyright Infringement of Design Documents” by J. Kent Holland Jr., November 2002. Using a recent case as an example, Kent Holland discusses the importance of preserving the copyright interest of the architects design documents.
Electronic communication has not arrived. Rather, it is still arriving in pieces, it is here to stay, and I (we) use it all the time. We send pdf’s and sometimes word if the client intends to modify. E-mail is used instead of meetings and FTP sites are used for distribution, etc. Yes there is no stopping the use of this stuff, but there are many problems, some of which go unnoticed until too late. Examples include pdf files that are only partly converted from word to pdf (but it appears to have completely converted; not all the text is present). In creating a group of pdf files sometimes the software skips a file. When clients modify their own specs in word there are software problems we sometimes can never explain. Electronic communication is here to stay and it is not perfect as we sometimes expect it to be. So, what to do?
One of my pet peeves is meetings through e-mail. It is really very confusing to have e-mails go out to a dozen people and have responses trickle in one by one and then responses go back out to responses. This is unerving. It works fine in a discussion forum like this one, but very poorly on a design meeting.
My point is, electronic may be here to stay, but it really isn’t all here yet. And I really don’t see the increase in quality of design or specifications.
It’s been several months since the last post - anything new? Is anyone distributing bidding documents on CD/DVD or via website? If so, how is it working?