Are your architectural drawings subject to copyright?

You have paid for a set of drawings. They show your house as it is now, your proposed extension, the floor plans, the elevations, the site plan, all of it. You might assume that because you paid for them, they belong to you and you can do whatever you like with them. Give them to another designer to modify, send them to a different builder, use them on a second project, hand them to a friend who wants something similar done to their place.

It is not that simple, and getting it wrong can land you in a legal dispute that costs more than the drawings did in the first place.

Architectural drawings are artistic works under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and they are protected by copyright from the moment they are created. That protection lasts for the lifetime of the person who created them plus seventy years. It applies whether the drawings are hand-drawn or produced on a computer, whether they are simple sketches or detailed construction drawings, and whether or not they carry a copyright notice. The absence of a copyright symbol on the drawing does not mean it is not protected. It is.

The default position in UK law is that the person who creates a work owns the copyright in it. If an architectural designer produces your drawings, the copyright belongs to the architectural designer, not to you. You have paid for the service of having the drawings produced and you have a licence to use them for the purpose they were commissioned for, which is typically to obtain planning permission and Building Regulation approval and to have the building work carried out. But the underlying intellectual property in the design remains with the person who created it.

There is an exception. If the drawings are produced by an employee in the course of their employment, the copyright belongs to the employer rather than the individual employee. So if you hire an architectural practice with employed designers, the practice owns the copyright. If you hire a sole trader or a freelance designer, that individual owns it. And if a builder or another third party produces sketches or drawings, the same rules apply to them.

This can be varied by contract. A designer and a client can agree in writing that copyright transfers to the client, or they can agree a wider licence that allows the client to do more with the drawings than the default position would permit. But this has to be explicit and in writing. It does not happen automatically just because you have paid a large fee, and it does not happen because you believe it should.

Under the default licence that comes with commissioning a set of drawings, you can use them for the project they were designed for. You can submit them for planning permission. You can submit them for Building Regulation approval. You can give them to your builder to work from on site. You can keep copies for your own records. You can include them in your home information pack if you sell the property.

What you cannot do, unless your contract says otherwise, is give them to another designer to modify or develop. You cannot use them as the basis for a different project on a different site. You cannot reproduce them for someone else to use. And you cannot strip the designer's name off them and present them as your own work, though in practice that one tends to sort itself out because a set of drawings without the originator's details on them raises questions with any planning authority or building control body that receives them.

The one that causes the most disputes in practice is the first one. You fall out with your designer halfway through the project, or you decide to switch to someone cheaper, or the designer retires or stops trading, and you want to take the half-finished drawings to someone else to complete. Unless your contract gives you the right to do that, the new designer cannot legally modify the original drawings without the original designer's permission. They can produce entirely new drawings from scratch, which means resurveying the property and starting the design again, but they cannot simply redline the existing set and resubmit them.

This is where it gets slightly more complicated. Copyright protects the drawings as artistic works, but it also extends to the design of the building as a work of architecture. The 1988 Act specifically includes buildings as artistic works, which means the three-dimensional design of the building is protected as well as the two-dimensional drawings of it.

In practice this means you cannot take someone else's building design and reproduce it, even if you produce your own drawings from scratch to do it. If your neighbour has had an extension designed and you want exactly the same thing, having your own designer draw it up does not get around the copyright on the original design. It is the design that is protected, not just the piece of paper it is recorded on.

That said, copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. A rectangular single-storey rear extension with a flat roof is a generic concept that nobody can own. But a specific arrangement of rooms, a particular roofline profile, a distinctive elevation treatment, these are expressions of design skill and they do attract protection. The line between a generic building type and a protectable design is not always obvious, which is why disputes about it end up in court often enough that there is a reasonable body of case law on the subject.

Not in any way that changes the legal position. Computer-generated drawings are protected in exactly the same way as hand-drawn ones. The common misconception is that because CAD software generates the lines, the output is somehow less "creative" than a hand-drawn design and therefore less deserving of protection. That is wrong. The creativity is in the design decisions, not in the tool used to record them. An architectural designer using AutoCAD or Revit is making the same design choices as one using pencil and tracing paper, and the copyright position is identical.

Where CAD does change things slightly is in the ease of modification. It is trivially easy to open someone else's CAD file and alter it, which is one reason why designers are sometimes reluctant to hand over native CAD files. A PDF or a printed drawing can be used on site and submitted to the council, which is what you have paid for. The native file format is the designer's working tool and handing it over makes unauthorised modification effortless, even if it remains unlawful.

If you need native files, that is a conversation to have at the start of the project, not at the end, and it is reasonable for the designer to charge more for them or to include specific terms about what they may be used for.

This comes up surprisingly often and the answer is less comfortable than you might hope. The copyright still exists. It does not disappear because the designer has retired, closed the practice, or died. It passes to their estate or their business successors, and in theory you would need permission from whoever holds the copyright to have the drawings modified by someone else.

In practice, if the designer is genuinely untraceable and the business has ceased to exist, the risk of a copyright claim being pursued is low. But "low risk" is not the same as "no risk", and it is not the same as "lawful". The pragmatic approach in that situation is to commission new drawings from scratch, which any competent designer can do by surveying the property and designing afresh, rather than modifying the old ones without permission and hoping nobody notices.

When you commission drawings from ABDS, the copyright in those drawings belongs to us. You receive a licence to use them for the project they were designed for, which covers everything from the planning application through to the builder working on site. If you need a wider licence, or if you want to discuss what happens to the drawings if you want to modify the project later, we are happy to have that conversation at the start rather than discovering the issue when it becomes a problem.

If you have questions about architectural drawings and copyright, or if you are in the situation where you have a set of drawings and you are not sure what you can do with them, give us a call on 07773 899 597 or email abds@abds.biz. We would rather explain it upfront than see you end up in a dispute that could have been avoided.