Is the design of a building a Copyright protected work?
The design of a building usually entails to deal with functional and technical aspects together with aesthetical and artistic ones, all of them conditioned by technical, legal and urbanistic limits as well as by the very nature and functions of the building itself.
Notwithstanding that there are buildings whose artistic elements made eligible for Copyright protection, the Spanish Case Law had not established the criteria to be taken into account when the building at stake has a more reduced artistic dimension.
Everything changed with the Spanish Supreme Court Judgement 1644/2017 of 26th of April 2017 where the court set some considerations to assess the originality of such works for the effects of protecting them by Copyright.
In the case, an architect -claimant- designed a building that subsequently lead to a second project in collaboration with another two architects-defendants. Such second project did not finally go ahead due to financial constraints. Some years later, the defendants created a third project based on the former, without the consent of the claimant, who aims to be recognised as co-author.
In order to assess whether or not the claimant is the co-author, the Supreme Court establishes that the work should be original in objective terms, requiring that the author contributions are new and singular since “not all architectonic project entails creativity per se”.
Finally, since the work was a collaborative one and the claimant contributions were limited to non-original and merely technical aspects, the claimant cannot be deemed to be author for Copyright protection purposes.
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