Jack: Is "concrete answer" a pun in an architectural context? (har har!)
In your place I would find an attorney who has had experience with architectural copyright. Maybe someone on this list knows of such a lawyer in your area.
If you find this hypothetical architectural copyright attorney, good questions to take to him might be: What is the public domain in architectural copyright? Not every feature of the floor plan you like may be copyrightable. Having the bathtub in a separate room from the dining room, for example, may not be a copyrightable feature. Another good question for a lawyer or an architectural historian: What are the accessible sources of public-domain floor plans? It may be that the plan you have in your mind's eye is better approximated by some plan no longer under copyright than by the presumably copyrighted plan that you saw.
In the end it may not be possible for you on your own, without infringing, to create the design you want. You may have to hire the architect whose plan you saw, or pay him (or his assigns) royalties on the copyrightable features of his design which you adopt in your design, or forego building if that architect or his assigns won't deal with you at a price you can afford.
The above is not legal advice, and doesn't establish a lawyer-client relationship, etc.
Tim Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> Received on Fri Jul 31 1998 - 16:01:20 GMT
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