Can You Sell Prints of Famous Buildings on Etsy? The Architectural Copyright Rule Sellers Get Backwards

Most Etsy sellers in the city-art niche have the risk exactly upside down.

They agonise over whether a watercolour of a downtown skyline will get them a copyright strike — and it almost certainly won't. Then they cheerfully list a laser-cut wooden model of the same skyline, or a print of a war memorial, and never think about it again. Both of those are meaningfully riskier than the watercolour.

The reason is a single, short, badly-publicised section of the Copyright Act: 17 U.S.C. § 120(a). It is one of the most seller-friendly provisions in all of US intellectual property law, and it has four hard edges that almost every "is it legal to sell skyline art" blog post fails to mention.

Here is what the law actually says, where it stops, and how to build a landmark-art shop that survives a rights-holder sweep.

The rule almost nobody quotes

Buildings did not have copyright protection in the US until the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) took effect on 1 December 1990. Congress passed it to bring the US in line with the Berne Convention, and it created a brand-new category of protected work: the architectural work — the design of a building as embodied in the building itself, in plans, or in drawings.

But Congress knew that giving architects a copyright in their buildings would create an absurd result: every tourist photo of Manhattan would be an infringement. So it wrote in an exemption at § 120(a):

"The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place."

Read that carefully, because it is the closest thing to a free pass that exists in this area.

If a building is constructed and ordinarily visible from a public place, the architect cannot stop you from making, distributing, or displaying a picture, painting, photograph, or other pictorial representation of it. Not "cannot stop you for personal use." Not "cannot stop you unless it's commercial." The statute contains no personal-use limitation and no commercial carve-out.

That means a photograph, an illustration, a line drawing, a watercolour, a vector poster, or a stylised print of a copyrighted modern building — sold commercially, on Etsy, at scale — does not infringe the architect's copyright. Full stop.

This is why the extremely common advice to "stick to generic silhouettes rather than detailed renderings" is, on the copyright side, backwards. The detailed rendering is exempt. As you will see in a moment, the silhouette is where the trademark problem lives.

So if § 120(a) is that generous, why do landmark sellers get taken down at all? Because the exemption has four edges, and Etsy shops fall off all of them.

Edge 1: It only covers pictorial representations. Your 3D model is not exempt.

The statute lists "pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations." That phrase is doing enormous work, and it is a two-dimensional concept.

A three-dimensional reproduction of a building is not a pictorial representation of it. It is a copy of the architectural work — squarely within the copyright owner's § 106(1) reproduction right, with no exemption available.

This lands directly on some of the fastest-growing product categories on Etsy:

• 3D-printed landmark models — miniatures of skyscrapers, stadiums, opera houses, museums
• Laser-cut and layered wooden skyline art — the multi-layer standing skyline pieces, city-shaped lamps, engraved acrylic blocks
• Architecture-style brick kits and model-building sets
• Resin and cast replicas, ornaments, bookends, and 3D shadow boxes

If the building depicted was completed on or after 1 December 1990, the architect holds a live copyright in the design, and a 3D reproduction of it is not covered by § 120(a). A 2D print of that same building is. The medium — not the subject — is what moves you across the line.

This is the single most under-appreciated risk in the entire niche, and it compounds with the platform rules covered in our guides to selling 3D prints on Etsy, laser-cut and engraved products, and what a purchased STL file's commercial licence actually permits.

The practical test: if a customer could hang it flat on a wall, § 120(a) probably protects you. If they could pick it up and turn it around, it probably doesn't.

Edge 2: It only covers buildings. Monuments and public sculpture are not buildings.

§ 120(a) applies to architectural works. A statue, a memorial, an installation, a mural, a fountain, or a piece of public art is a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work — a completely different category, with no § 120(a) exemption attached to it.

Standing in a public park photographing it changes nothing. The US has no general "freedom of panorama" right for artworks. If a sculpture is under copyright, a photograph of it is a reproduction, and selling that photograph is an infringement.

The definitive proof is Gaylord v. United States. Frank Gaylord sculpted The Column — the nineteen steel soldiers at the heart of the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. The US Postal Service put a photograph of it on a 37-cent commemorative stamp, printed roughly 86.8 million of them, and licensed the image onto retail goods. Gaylord sued. The Federal Circuit held that he owned the copyright and the Postal Service had infringed it, and after a decade of litigation the Court of Federal Claims awarded him a 10% royalty on $5.4 million of stamp revenue — $540,000 plus prejudgment interest, affirmed on appeal in 2015.

Sit with that. The subject was a federal war memorial, on federal land, photographed from a public place, used by the federal government. Every intuition a seller has about "it's a public monument, it's fine" was wrong.

The same logic reaches Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate — "The Bean" in Chicago's Millennium Park, one of the most photographed objects in America and a staple of Chicago-themed Etsy listings. Kapoor holds the copyright in the sculpture, has publicly asserted it, and sued the National Rifle Association in federal court in 2018 over the appearance of the Bean in a promotional video. (The NRA pulled the footage and the matter settled.) Chicago's own guidance separates casual personal photography from commercial use, and the city has long required permits for professional shoots in the park.

So: your Chicago skyline print is fine. Your Chicago print with a lovingly-rendered Bean in the foreground is a different product with a different rights-holder.

The categories to watch on Etsy:

• War memorials and veterans' memorials — often modern, often still in copyright, often emotionally-marketed products where the sculptor's estate is watching
• Public sculpture and "instagrammable" installations — the Bean, LOVE sculptures, wings murals, painted-wall photo spots
• Murals and street art — a mural on a building is a PGS work; being painted on architecture does not automatically pull it into § 120(a)
• Fountains, gates, arches, and decorative civic art

Edge 3: It only limits copyright. Trademark is a separate floor.

Here is where the advice to "just use a silhouette" collapses.

§ 120(a) is a limitation on copyright in architectural works. It says nothing at all about trademark, and a building's owner can — and the aggressive ones absolutely do — register the building's image, design, and silhouette as trademarks and enforce them against merchandise.

The Empire State Building is the case study. ESRT Empire State Building, L.L.C. holds 42 registered trademarks tied to the building, 17 of which protect its distinctive design and silhouette, and one of which is registered for the service of "promoting the goods and services of others by licensing images of an iconic building." That is not a defensive portfolio; that is a revenue line. ESRT's public terms state that the building's image and likeness may not be used on labels, brands or logos without a licence.

And they litigate. In ESRT Empire State Building, L.L.C. v. Michael Liang, a beer producer applied to register a logo featuring the building. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board found the Empire State Building's design mark is famous, and that the beer logo was likely to dilute it. Note what that means for you: dilution doesn't require any consumer confusion, and it doesn't require you to be in the same industry as the rights-holder. Fame is enough.

The Empire State Building was completed in 1931 — decades before the AWCPA. It has no architectural copyright at all. The copyright analysis for a print of it is a non-event. The trademark analysis is the whole ballgame. That inversion is exactly what sellers miss.

The same pattern shows up with the Hollywood Sign, whose word and design marks are held by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and licensed through the Hollywood Sign Trust — the sign has been in place since 1923 and is not a "building" in any sense, but it is comprehensively trademarked.

The counterweight is worth knowing too, because it stops you over-correcting into paralysis. In Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum v. Gentile Productions, 134 F.3d 749 (6th Cir. 1998), the museum tried to stop a photographer selling posters of its I.M. Pei-designed building. The Sixth Circuit vacated the injunction, holding the museum had not shown the public recognised the building's design as a trademark indicating source or sponsorship. A building being famous does not automatically make its shape a trademark. The owner has to have actually used and promoted the design as a brand.

So building trademarks are real but not universal. The question is never "is this building famous?" It is "has this building's owner built a licensing programme around its image?" Answer that with a search, not a guess — the method is in our guide to checking a trademark before you list. Owners with active licensing programmes advertise the fact; a two-minute look at the landmark's official site usually settles it.

Edge 4: It only covers US law. Freedom of panorama stops at the border.

§ 120(a) is American. Etsy is not.

Many countries have a broad "freedom of panorama" that lets you commercially depict works permanently sited in public. Others have almost none — and France is the one that matters most, because the Eiffel Tower is one of the highest-volume landmark subjects on Etsy.

The structure of the Eiffel Tower is long out of copyright; Gustave Eiffel died in 1923. But the tower's nighttime illuminations — the golden lighting and the sparkling beacon display — are treated as a separate protected artistic work, created by lighting designer Pierre Bideau. Bideau died in 2021, which under French law puts the lighting design in copyright until roughly 2094. The tower's operator, SETE, states plainly that the illuminations are subject to copyright and that professional and commercial distribution of night images requires prior authorisation and a fee.

The practical rule for sellers: a daytime Eiffel Tower image is safe. A night one is licensed. Countless Etsy listings sell exactly the sparkling-tower print that SETE says needs a licence.

The same trap exists elsewhere in Europe — Belgium's Atomium is famously aggressive about its image rights, and Italy's cultural heritage code has been used to challenge commercial reproductions of works held by Italian institutions. If your landmark is outside the US, look up the local rule rather than assuming § 120(a) travels.

The replica trap: a copy of a public-domain landmark has its own copyright

This one is genuinely counter-intuitive, and it is the single easiest way for a careful seller to get caught.

The Statue of Liberty is public domain. Bartholdi's work is comfortably out of copyright, and you can sell prints of it all day.

But in 2011 the US Postal Service issued a Forever stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty, licensing the photo from Getty for $1,500. It later emerged that the photo was not of the statue in New York Harbor — it was of Robert Davidson's replica outside the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Davidson sued. In Davidson v. United States (Fed. Cl. 2018), the court held that his replica was sufficiently original to be independently copyrightable — he had given the face a "fresher and more feminine look" — and that the USPS had infringed. The award: $3,554,946.95, plus interest, on a stamp run of billions.

The lesson for Etsy sellers is precise and actionable: the public-domain status of the original tells you nothing about the reference image you actually used. If you trace, paint from, or AI-generate against a photo of a modern replica, a reconstruction, or a themed-resort recreation, you may be copying a living artist's protected derivative work rather than the public-domain original. The same problem recurs across our guides to selling public-domain art and public-domain characters: the thing everyone can use is surrounded by things nobody can.

Source your reference from the real landmark, keep a record of where the image came from, and never build a product line off a single scraped photo. And if you licensed the base image at all, check that the licence permits print-on-demand resale — see using stock photos in Etsy listings.

What this all means for your shop

Genuinely low-risk (§ 120(a) does the work):

• 2D prints, posters, illustrations and photographs of buildings visible from a public place — including modern, still-copyrighted ones
• City skyline art, architectural line drawings, blueprint-style posters of buildings
• The same images on flat goods where the design is a pictorial representation: prints, cards, tea towels, apparel graphics
• Any building completed before 1 December 1990 — no architectural copyright exists at all

Risky and widely under-estimated:

• Any 3D reproduction of a post-1990 building — laser-cut skylines, 3D-printed models, resin replicas, brick kits
• Monuments, memorials and public sculpture in any medium, 2D or 3D — no exemption applies
• Interiors. § 120(a) requires the work to be "ordinarily visible from a public place." A lobby, atrium or interior detail generally is not
• Trademarked landmarks with licensing programmes — the Empire State Building, the Hollywood Sign, many stadiums and arenas — where the silhouette itself is the mark
• Non-US landmarks in countries with narrow freedom of panorama — the illuminated Eiffel Tower being the biggest single example
• Replicas of public-domain works, which carry a fresh copyright owned by the modern sculptor

The pre-listing checklist

Before you add a landmark product, run these five questions. It takes about five minutes per subject and it is the difference between a shop and a takedown.

1. Is it a building, or is it a sculpture? If sculpture, memorial, mural or installation — you need a licence or a different subject. § 120(a) does not apply.

2. Is my product 2D or 3D? If 3D, check the building's completion date. Pre-1 December 1990: no architectural copyright, proceed to the trademark question. Post-1990: you are reproducing a protected architectural work and you need permission.

3. Is it ordinarily visible from a public place? Exteriors, yes. Interiors, private grounds, and anything you photographed from inside a paid perimeter — assume not.

4. Does the owner license the building's image? Search the landmark's name in the USPTO database and read its official website's terms. An active licensing programme is a bright red flag, and it applies to silhouettes.

5. Where is the landmark? US: § 120(a) covers you for 2D. Elsewhere: look up the country's freedom-of-panorama rule before you list, and treat night-lit European landmarks as licensed by default.

If a complaint lands anyway

An IP report on a landmark listing usually comes from one of three places: a building owner's licensing agent, a sculptor or their estate, or an automated brand-protection sweep that pattern-matched a silhouette.

Do not deactivate the listing in a panic and do not fire off a counter-notice before you know which of the four edges you fell off. The response is completely different depending on whether you are facing an architectural copyright claim (where § 120(a) may be a complete answer for a 2D work), a sculptural copyright claim (where it is no answer at all), or a trademark claim (where the analysis turns on source confusion and dilution, not copying).

Work through what to do when you receive an Etsy DMCA takedown and, if the notice is a trademark complaint rather than a copyright one, how to respond to an Etsy trademark violation notice — and remember that Etsy does not adjudicate the merits. A legally correct listing can still be removed. Your goal is to make sure that when a complaint arrives you know, in one sentence, exactly why your product is lawful.

Landmark and skyline art remains one of the best niches on Etsy precisely because the law is unusually generous to it. § 120(a) hands you a statutory right that sellers in almost every other category would kill for. Use it deliberately — and stay off the four edges.

Want to know which of your listings are sitting on a trademarked silhouette or a copyrighted sculpture before a rights-holder finds them? ShieldMyShop scans your Etsy shop against live trademark and IP data and flags the listings most likely to draw a complaint. Start a free trial and get your first shop scan in minutes.