For Software Publishers, Vendors, Bloggers and News Sites – How Revit Add-ons Handles Copyrighted Material

Recently, the author of some articles we re-posted on Revit Add-ons contacted us to ask that we remove approximately 80% of the content from our site and link back to his site for the balance. This was the first time in our 6+ years that someone contacted us with what could be interpreted as copyright concerns, and it prompted us to formally define our approach to copyrighted material.

Revit Add-ons is primarily a news aggregation site with the desire to connect potential users to add-in publishers, and to keep existing users up to date. Yes, in doing so, we profit from the work of others (in the form of advertisements), but we like to think that we're providing a service to the Revit add-ons community, readers and publishers alike. (Also, our advertisers receive enhanced coverage of their products.)

First and foremost, we appreciate the hard work of originators of content in our thriving Revit add-ons community, and we recognize that their materials, including descriptions, images, etc, are their sole property. We do our best to clearly and properly source this material when we use it. Still, if we re-post some of your content and you'd like it removed from Revit Add-ons, or to have it altered in some way, please let us know and we will immediately comply with your wishes.

Of course, conversely, our original content is under our copyright. As long as others properly source it, we're okay with that–with the notable exception of improperly appropriating trademarked items such as our logo and other original artwork.

Also, Revit Add-ons is not a piracy site, and we condemn all forms of software piracy. Attempts to pirate software that we become aware of through our site will be reported to the appropriate authorities.

We source content from three types of sites:

1. Add-in publisher and vendor websites
2. Blogs
3. News sites

From now on, we're going to handle these three sources a little differently.

For add-in publishers and vendors, we understand their primary motivation to be to get people to use their products, and we assume that the old axiom 'any publicity is good publicity' is true. Therefore, we re-post their content whole-cloth, re-formatted for our site, properly sourcing it and linking back to their websites. Going forward, we'll also provide copyright notices at the ends of these kinds of posts.

The motivations of bloggers and news sites are different from publishers and vendors. For bloggers, it's often about sharing their knowledge and building their personal brand to increase their awareness and value in the marketplace. For news sites, the motivation is oftentimes financial gain from ads, which require pageviews on their sites (this is sometimes true of bloggers too). From now on, when sourcing blogs or news sites, we'll post a small portion of the content and then, where we'd normally insert a page break, link back to their site for the rest.

We hope that this approach is amenable to all concerned. If you have any concerns or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you!

Tim Grimm
Ye ole editor
Greater Seattle area
Not bad for a reformed Bentley guy