Quote:
Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper
The intent of the drawings is to license them out to raise funds to support the site.
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Yeah that's probably the central issue. Fair use tends to be meant for either news reporting, analysis or critique in which someone is creating new content based on someone else's copyrighted material and is limited to using the minimum necessary sample of the original creation. But in this case we're talking about basically a full recreation that's intended to be as close a reproduction as possible which is then copyrighted by the site for commercial use. Before the building exists, the design is solely the product of the architecture(s) and rendering artists' creative design.
If we were to compare that to other intellectual creations like music, if you attempted to reproduce a song as closely as possible, credit the name of the artist who did the reproduction rather than who created the original work, then claimed ownership under your own commercial copyright, obviously that wouldn't be allowed either. You could perhaps make an argument under the news reporting angle, but that would be more like if you just included a sample of the original rendering in a story about the project and cited and original copyright holder like you'd see on UT. Much different than reproducing something that you're calling your original work.
So while it kinda sucks, it also makes some sense.