The Spanish Supreme Court has recently ruled on the concept of originality in the field of architectural works, thereby establishing—for the first time—clear and precise guidelines for the application of copyright protection to this type of work.
The factual scenario giving rise to the litigation is very common in the architecture sector. An architect (the plaintiff in the first and second instances) prepared an architectural design for a hotel in Barcelona at the request of a real estate developer. Upon failing to obtain authorization from the urban planning authorities, the developer hired two other architects (defendants in the first and second instances and appellants in the cassation proceeding) to prepare a second proposal that complied with municipal urban planning regulations. The plaintiff and the defendants entered into an agreement whereby the plaintiff relinquished 50% of the project management responsibilities, thereby sharing the commission with the other two. A second project was drawn up and signed by the three architects, but it was put on hold due to the developer’s lack of liquidity. Two years later, the defendants submitted a third project, substantially identical to the previous one, but this time without the plaintiff’s signature. This led to the filing of a lawsuit against the architects who signed the third project, in which it was primarily alleged that the project constituted a collaborative work, as regulated by Article 7 of the TRLPI, and that, consequently, the rights to it belonged to the architects in equal shares. The plaintiff demanded recognition as a co-author of the project and payment of the fees to which he would have been entitled in that capacity.
In the Court’s view, an architectural work is a functional work that is protected by copyright only to the extent that it is “unique.” Beyond its aesthetic or practical merits, the work must exhibit “a novel character that distinguishes it from preexisting works.” If “ordinary” buildings are designed—lacking even a minimal degree of uniqueness or distinctiveness—intellectual property law does not apply to them.
The ruling’s statements could not be clearer: “Not every architectural project is inherently creative, nor does the fact that a building is larger or smaller in size, or is intended to be a hotel, imply such creativity. Not every architectural project or building is an original work protected by intellectual property rights.”
The Court denies the plaintiff architect the status of author with respect to the work on which he collaborated with the defendants. As the Court clarifies, in the case of a collaborative work in which parts that meet the requirement of originality can be distinguished from parts that do not, and such parts correspond to different architects, “those who have made original contributions to the architectural project shall be considered authors protected by intellectual property law, and those who have created the parts lacking originality shall not enjoy such status or protection, without prejudice to any contractual rights arising from the commission received and the work performed to fulfill it.”
In the present case, the Court finds that the plaintiff’s contribution did not possess the necessary creative level to be considered the author, unlike the portion created exclusively by the defendants and limited essentially to the volumetric composition, the facade, and the exterior spaces—elements to which compositional criteria characterized by originality were applied.
The ruling in question is of enormous significance because it not only reinforces the general concept of originality that a given creation must possess in order to be considered a work, but also establishes fairly clear guidelines for its specific application to architectural projects.
Spanish version of the article published on the Kluwer Copyright Blog
