Ideas are precious, precious things. A good one can upend a movement or make a career and they are, of course, worth a great deal. Architects live in a competitive globalized world, and in the race to succeed, defining who owns ideas is becoming increasingly important in an architect's professional life. ArchDaily has previously explained the essential points of architectural copyright and explored the complexities of legal judgments, but what if you want to work internationally? It's a much more complex issue than "China will let people copy what they want" or "Belgians will sue you" and if you want to work outside your home country then it's essential you understand the variables.
Fortunately, we've got you covered: we've pulled together a rundown of the essentials of copyright law and practice in some of the most popular countries to find work - read on for more.
Holding all copyright law together is the Berne Convention: an international agreement dating right back to 1886 and covering the vast majority of the world. The convention was put together primarily to tackle the problem of international publishers being able to publish translated versions of foreign books without any obligations to the original author, but it's been expanded over the years to form the basic underpinning of international copyright law - and it covers architectural drawings and plans, as well as the buildings themselves, as long they're built in a signatory country; that shouldn't be a problem unless you're building in Greenland or Taiwan. Berne outlines a few key principles of copyright: copyright is automatic and requires no registration, copyright is fixed at a minimum of 50 years after the authors death (with exceptions) and works granted copyright in one nation signed up to Berne get copyright in them all. [1]
