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Re: Copyright strikes again



At 04:02 PM 7/12/2001 -0400, JEFF ARCHIVIST wrote:
    We have some blueprints in our collection of a house designed by an
     architect for our donor.  Who would hold copyright?  Is this a
     situation where the architect is considered to be doing a work for
     hire and the copyright would belong to the donor?  Or does the
     copyright stay with the architect?  Plus, I was looking at the Library
     of Congress website and their Circular 41 seems to say that no
     building built before 1990 or plans for a building published prior to
     1990 are protected by copyright.  This seems too good to be true. (to
     an archivist at least! maybe not to an architect!)

Architectural plans are copyrightable material. (see Circular 40, which
includes in its list of copyrighted works, "Technical drawings,
architectural drawings or plans, blueprints, diagrams, [and] mechanical
drawings."  Until 1990, however, buildings built from the plans were not
copyrightable.  If you could duplicate a building's design without having
to resort to the original plans, you were not liable for infringement.  Now
the building itself, as well as the plans, are copyrighted.  The
"architectural work" covered by Circular 41 is the building, not the plans.

As to who would hold copyright, that would depend on the nature of the
contract between the architect and the client, the date when the plans were
drawn, the amount of supervision the client had over the donor, and the
other complicated factors that determine authorship of a "work made for
hire."  Before 1978 I believe there was a presumption that if you hired an
architect to draw up plans for you, you owned the copyright in the plans -
but I haven't checked this.




---------------------------------------------------------------
Peter B. Hirtle
Co-Director                                pbh6@cornell.edu
Cornell Institute for Digital Collections     607/255-4033 (ph)
2B Kroch Library                                   607/255-9524 (fax)
Cornell University                <http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/>
Ithaca, NY  14853
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