Who Owns Your Drawings Once Your Brisbane Draftsman is…
There is a bit of controversy in the minds of many people who hire a Sunshine Coast or Brisbane draftsman about who exactly owns the drawing once it is completed. We need to separate two concepts to make this clear. The two portions are ownership of use and who holds the copyright. These rules should hold true for every draftsman Brisbane builders have in their employment or independent draftsmen.
We will start off by discussing the issue of copyright since this is where the confusion begins. A copyright is granted to the person who creates a unique work such as a book, article, painting, or home construction drawings. They copyright is the creator protection to keep their intellectual work from being copied and reused without their consent.
Copyright vs Ownership of Drawings
When you hire a Brisbane draftsman to create your home construction drawings for a new home, renovation, or extension they will almost always put a copyright on the drawing. This protects them from having a builder, material supply house, or other person who gains access to the drawing from freely sharing and publishing the drawing without their express consent. They do not wish for their hard work to become public property.
It might seem this is restrictive to you, the person buying the drawing, but in reality it is a blessing to you, also. You commissioned this project so you would have a unique home which is yours. If the drawings become freely available you might suddenly discover your home being reproduced right in your own neighborhood.
When we discuss ownership of the drawing things change slightly. You have purchased exclusive rights to the drawing you commissioned. It is your drawing to use for the creation of your home and to maintain a copy of. What you cannot do it take the drawings the draftsman created and have another firm reproduce the drawing.
Getting Permission to Use Your Own Drawings?
These issues come to the forefront most commonly when a home owner wishes to have an extension added or do renovations. The new draftsman cannot take the existing drawings and duplicate them for his own use. He must either request permission from the other drafting firm or make an original drawing of the basic structure for his use. In most cases a simple request by the home owner who originally commissioned the drafting project will get the proper permissions to use the drawings for the renovation project.
Drafting Concepts Pty Ltd has some excellent explanations of these issues on their site. They want to make sure their clients understand these issues fully. One interesting point they bring up concerns the sketches and rough drawings created by you or when you work in tandem with them during a consultation. Those drawings are normally considered the property of the home owner and can be taken to other draftsmen for quotes.
Drawings Discovered Online May Not Be Free to Use
Why do we need to discuss these issues and make them clear? It is because frequently people wishing to build a home have found floor plans and drawings from a website online and brings them into a draftsman. They want to drawings tweaked slightly to create their own home construction drawings. As any reputable company providing drafting services will explain they cannot use those drawings, they will need to create drawings based upon the concept. Your drafting solutions will need to be uniquely created for you. If you have found plans online you would like to use bring them to a free quote consultation at Drafting Concepts Pty Ltd and ask Daryl Wood and Kwang Ja Lim what you can do and cannot do with the drawings. They will clearly explain your options and provide you with an estimate of costs to make the drawings you need.