California’s state legislature has passed a bill sponsored by the American Institute of Architects California (AIACA) that will limit public access to copyrighted architectural drawings for the first time.
The recently-signed SB 1214 concerns drawings that were submitted to local and state government offices and will take effect on January 1st, 2023. San Francisco-based architect Cary Bernstein is the member who initiated the act and says it will enhance the protections already provided by the Federal Copyright Act that are not properly being upheld by planning processes within the state.
“The law balances California's Ralph M. Brown Act which ensures the public's right ‘to attend and participate in meetings of local legislative bodies’ with long-standing federal copyright laws that protect architectural drawings,” Bernstein said in a statement. “I happen to love law, and this issue allowed me to indulge my interest through a project for [the chapter].”
Drawings, site plans, and other types of information are protected under the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990. However, as the convention of electronic permit filing becomes more and more accessible, the intellectual property of architects like Bernstein has become susceptible to poaching and even more sophisticated attempts to duplicate their designs, making it difficult to do business in a competitive industry that is fundamentally reliant on creativity and the originality of a particular proposal.
With the help of attorney Steven Weinberg (who co-authored the 1990 amendment) and the chapter’s Vice President of Government Relations Robert Ooley, State Senator Brian Jones eventually took the issue to Sacramento where it passed handily before being signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. The chapter is likening it to similar protections granted to professionals in other artistic arenas and says its contents strike at the core of its organizational mission.
“SB 1214 is reflective of two major tenets,” AIACA Executive Vice President Nicki Dennis Stephens said finally. “The equivalence of an architect's work with other fields such as art and music, and the capabilities of the individual to make a change.”
8 Comments
This is misguided legislation. All plans for buildings must be available for public access.
Why is that?
No. You're wrong.
access to approved plans by the owners for buildings is necessary for future changes to those buildings. There should be a sunset clause of 5 to 10 years.
This statement is largely uninformed and on its face dim.
Plans that are not available for public access are often, as in the State of Texas where I unfortunately reside, make them unavailable to building owners and to their third-party inspectors. This is a recipe for disaster in my experience every single day.
So... 5 months between visits to this article? some experience you have...
Explain something if I contract an architect to design my building, how is it that I wouldn't have access to the documents that I paid them to create?
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