Flood, drainage, earthworks and traffic models
Can a civil engineering firm sell its design models to AI?
Updated
The tools are mostly silent on the models you build in them. That silence leaves the question with your appointments, not with the software vendor.
What the tool documents say
We read 23 licences, terms and privacy notices from 15 vendors. 15 of them say nothing about who owns a scheme's models, and none says anything about training AI on them. Their licences govern the software, which a buyer never receives.
Source: Civil design tools on a practice's data, vendor by vendor
Where a vendor does keep something
- Causeway Technologies
- Its privacy policy says it collects, uses and shares aggregated data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose.
- Fine (GEO5)
- Its privacy policy describes anonymised data used for licence management and diagnostics.
- CivilGEO
- Its privacy policy says it may share or publish aggregated information, including statistics about how customers use its applications.
- Aimsun
- Its privacy policy says that when a user account is terminated, the data relating to the customer account will be deleted.
Source: Civil design tools on a practice's data, vendor by vendor
What to take from it
Export the models you mean to keep before a subscription lapses, since none of the vendors read promises a period to fetch them. Then sort the schemes by the appointment they ran under, as set out on who owns civil engineering drawings, and set the federal ones aside.