Nathanael Rebsch wrote: > i once took care of sorting out the legal situation of OpenTTD. > OpenTTD was reverse engeneered from Transport Tycoon (Deluxe, IIRC). > This work was done in Sweden, where now law prohibited the reverse > engeneering if lisence agreements (e.g. eula) did not take care of such > notices - on this very CD of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, this indeed was > missing. > > (Assumed) Copyright of TTD used to belong to Micropose - in fact they > only ever had production rights - copyright was still with the > manager-company of chris sawyer (to mee unknown at that time). > Micropose was bought by Atari, so i contacted their legal department (a > few times actually) - which is where chris sawyers managers were > mentioned to me. after lengthy talks i called the company in the UK. > > end result: they were well aware of OpenTTD, they were not happy, they > would like to take the matter to court... BUT a few things just stand in > the way: > OpenTTD is released under GPL, there is no money behind OpenTTD, so in > fact there is nothing they could archieve with taking OpenTTD to court. > > what i want to express: > Airlines will most likely be very familiar with Flightgear. They will > very much know that liveries exist, and that these are distributed under > GPL compatible lisences. > they probably have larger legal departments and know everything they > need to know about such a project. > and there is probably a very good reason why they did not contact > Flightgear before. > > Generally you can wait until you receive a notice, before needing to > take action - some companies even risk that - and there is usually a lot > more money to be gotten than with Flightgear or other GPL released projects. > > greets > Nathanael Rebsch > > > Out of curiosity, a few years ago I contacted American Airlines legal dept in charge of trademarks and asked if their livery could be used on aircraft made available for or with FlightGear. The short answer is, no, they won't permit it. By US law, trademarks *must* be actively protected by their holders or they become common and unprotected in the eyes of the law. With that in mind, they really have no choice but to officially refuse permission.
However, reading between the legal weasel-words in their response and having had a glimpse into how the real world operates, you could put their AA logo on a nice, shiny aircraft model available for download and they will most likely turn their heads and look away. Overlay a vulgar work on top of their logo on your plane and you'll get a C&D letter as soon as they find out about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
