Over the past year or so I have been working on a large project of a public plaza in the heart of
downtown Chicago. In the middle of this plaza is a large
sculpture by
Alexander Calder. As part of the project we scanned the entire plaza which included the sculpture. We eventually model the sculpture adding it to our BIM model to assist with restoration work.
As the project progressed the thought never crossed my mind that this public sculpture may not have been released from copyright. I have known for some time that only works of architecture
constructed after 1990 are typically subject to copyright and had assumed that the sculpture, as part of the architecture, would fall into that category. I was wrong.
Public sculptures are not consider architecture and fall under the traditional rules of artistic copyright. These rules make it pretty clear that the sculpture is in fact a copyrighted work of art. To make things more interesting I discovered that in most cases the copyright is not signed over to the buildings owner but remains with the original artist or there estate.
You may be asking "So what's the big deal, your using it as part of the restoration project?" This is a reasonable and possibly correct statement. The problem can come up when the images of the work inevitably find there way out into presentations or worse yet promotional materials for your company. In our case the fact that this may be sketchy ground was brought up after a presentation in which the sculpture was shown. I am still not entirely sure that this was a problem but clearly using these images in
company promotional material would be.
This also speaks to a larger issue that we all face when scanning. The scanner captures everything. Weather it is sensitive materials left on a desk or copyrighted sculptures we as a profession must make sure that we respect the data that was obtained.
Further Reading
Wikipedia article on Copyright in Architecture in the United States:
Summery of above court ruling:
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