On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 05:22:37PM -0800, Simon Van Leeuwen wrote: | I believe there is creedance in the following conversation I had | recently with a designer/modeler in another part of the world. He has | produced a beautiful EDF F-104 which should be here in a week or so. | | It could very well be that endeavors like this outside of the USA fall | under different rules...but I doubt it as far as patent infringment is | concerned.
Any patents issued on the F-104 should have expired by now, since they're supposed to last 17 years. Now, there are ways to keep patents alive longer than that (by delaying their granting by repeatedly amending them before they're granted), but this is the exception rather than the norm. And even so, a model airplane probably wouldn't use most of the technologies that the jet itself used (except maybe if the shape were patented, or some new airfoil.) Copyrights now last a very long time (now 90 years for anything owned by a corporation, but the period was shorter in the past), but any copyrights on plans made in WW1 should have expired by now, and the same goes for WW2 though there's some room for them to still be valid, as the rules change if something is published vs. not published ... Trademarks are probably the sticker -- they don't expire. A company can abandon them, but they don't expire. But trademarks are usually applied to a phrase, or a logo -- things like that. Can you trademark an entire plane? Lockheed seems to think so. These three things are somewhat similar, and people get them confused all the time. However, legally, they're very different with very different rules applied to each one. | >..., however I need to spend time with my patent attorney And that's probably how any real attempt to fight this should start -- by talking to qualified legal counsel. (I'm certainly not a lawyer.) | >Regarding LM, someone just needs to stand up to them. People are | >ignorant of the laws relating to intellectual property protection. ... but that won't stop them from speaking as if they were an authority :) In any event, if your attorney tells you what you want to hear, and you have the finances to fight LM, I wish you the best of luck, and hope you succeed. I'm sure LM knows the laws relating to IP protection, but they probably also know that they can bully most people around very easily. It would be very nice to see them proven wrong ... -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jury - 12 people who determine which client has the better lawyer. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
