Those drawings were available on the planning authority’s website, but subject to a copyright notice and permission for limited uses (essentially consultation purposes). Fortis then proceeded with the development, using the original architects’ drawings in order to comply with the planning permission granted. Signature obtained planning permission but was unable to complete, and so the site was subsequently sold to Fortis. In this case a developer (Signature) exchanged contracts on a site and engaged architects to produce drawings. That was the essence of a High Court decision from February 2017 (Signature Realty Limited v Fortis Developments Limited and Beaumont Morgan Developments Limited, EWHC 3583 (Ch)).
What if your plans are used by a third party who has not bought the land from your client?
That remedy is therefore only as valuable as the solvency of your client, and if your client becomes insolvent, and the site passed into another’s hands, it’s effectively worthless. This means you can recover the payment through the courts, but not terminate the licence. The purpose of the architect retaining copyright is generally to prevent use by third parties who have paid no fee, so usually, particularly where payment is not expected to be made at the outset, the licence is given in return for a debt. You will only be able to do so if payment was a condition precedent or if non-payment can be treated as a repudiatory act (meaning something that goes to the heart of the contract) allowing the architect to terminate the licence. This licence ‘for all purposes connected with the building’ would also extend to reproducing the plans in marketing material to be shown to prospective purchasers.Įven if you’ve not been paid by your client, you may still be unable to stop the use of your plans. However, the licence is restricted to the practical exercise of copying to effect building and would not, for instance, permit the removal of the architect’s name from the plans or allow the client or the client’s new architect to put the plans forward as her own. This means not only your client but also a third party to whom your client sells the land may make copies of the plans and build out the building. whether by the client or by the purchasers of the plot, and by their surveyors or other contractors.for all purposes connected with the erection of that building, on that site, in substantial accordance with your drawings.
As built drawing copy right full#
It will always depend on the particular facts of the case, but, as a general principle, where you, the architect, have been paid the full fee for production of the drawings, then you will have impliedly licensed (even if you haven’t explicitly licensed) the use of the plans: This was the most common query, and naturally reflects a very typical state of affairs: is the licence of copyright the architect grants to the client personal to the client or is it transferable to a buyer or other successor in title to the property? What if the client subsequently sells the site to a third party or becomes insolvent?
These queries fell into a number of themes and here I try and address those. When I wrote about the ownership of copyright in architects’ drawings earlier this year it elicited as many questions as it answered.