On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 08:42:38AM -0600, Tim Bennett wrote: | I beg to differ. There is another potentially cheaper and quicker | fix. The issue is that the historic military aircraft that were | developed with public moneys are being claimed as the private | property of Lockheed Martin and other military contractors.
It's not that they're being claimed as such -- they _are_ such. The government many pay for the planes, may have even payed for their development, but generally the contract signed indicates that the ownership of the plane design itself belongs to the company. Congress should not just `fix' this, as it was part of the original contract. Contracts generally trump the law, unless the contract itself is illegal. | The question of fact is the ownership of this intellectual property. | The American people paid for it and should own the rights to what | they paid for. Congress can, and should, fix this with the stroke | of a pen. Write to your congressmen and senators making this | argument. How can they possibly oppose it? In a similar vein, Jeep owns the design for the Hummer, even though I believe it was created at the request of the US government. Your solution is worse than the problem. For Congress to declare that those contracts are invalid just because `well, we paid for it, it should be ours' would basically mean that nobody would do business with the government anymore. In any event, what really need to happen is that it needs to be determined, probably in court, what kind of protection the general shape and appearance of a plane can be afforded -- copyright, trademark, patent, or none of the above. And then once the general type of protection is determined, it needs to be determined how far it goes. After all, a scale model of a full sized plane generally has very little in common with the original plane beyond it's looks. If a plane's design is covered by copyright, then making a scale model may qualify as fair use, as the shape and appearance is only a very small part of the whole. But as suggested earlier, copyright is usually for artistic works, not things you build ... It's important to decide which types of protections can apply, because they have different rules and last for different periods. The only way this is likely to happen is to have somebody stand up to LM and actually fight them in court over it (and LM may not let it go that far if they know their position is shakey.) This will cost money, and just a few dollars from each of us won't quite cover it. The AMA could help, but they tend to not rock the boat. The EFF or ACLU may be more interested, but it doesn't sound like their cup of tea either. -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] "An idiot with a computer is a faster, better idiot" - Rich Julius 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
