Lessig's "Creative Commons" @ The FAA

tramm writes "The FAA, working with the EAA have put together a proposal to release old type certificates and blueprints once the copyright holders no longer exist. Sort of like Abandonware for airplanes. This very closely resembles Lawrence Lessig's idea of a creative commons, into which source code would be escrowed. Once the copyright expired or became abandonded, the sources would be released. "This set of legal guidelines will help the FAA develop a set of procedures to legally release what had previously been unnecessarily protected as proprietary data.". Hopefully the Copyright office will take note of the success here, as well as the Supreme Court's hearing of Eldred v Reno."

Comments

Start with NASA

[owlmeat]

I'd love to see acutual engineering documents and code for stuff like the Saturn V, the lunar module and the ground control computers

Sounds Great

[sasha328]

Just so people don't get confused about what this will achieve: It will only help vintage aircraft oweners. Most of the old vintage aircraft have no manuals (IPCs etc); and the repairs would generally be applied through FAA approved engineers. Most, if not all newer aircraft will not be affected by this. I do not think that the FAA will let any one build an aircraft using these blueprints because the certification nw is totally different than earlier last century. They may however be built as experimental aircraft. That is where I think te EAA comes in.

not quite the same thing..

[thesupraman]

While it may be perfectly sensible in this case (hey, aircraft and software are very different), I think a LOT of people would be nervous if their source code was automatically made available once their 'copyright' was over, this is a MUCH more serious step than just loosing your copyright.

if you loose a copyright, people can copy the program, but still need to reverse-engineer the source if they want to know your implementation.

of course, I'm totally supportive of fully open source, but we should remember that copyright is peoples right if they decide to go that way, and we should not assume that when this lapses we have the right to ALL of their work, they just loose that particular bit of protection.

there is a world of difference between copyright on a particular implementation, and the massivly 'general' patents currently being handed out in the US over quite obvious software techniques, the second are much more... stuipd, dangerous, ridiculous, etc, etc.... however copright is a MUCH simpler concent, so long as it's length is kept reasonable, and it's extent is limited.

of course, in the case of the copyright holder 'ceasing to exist' the case becomes much more hazy.. since ther is noone to defent the copyright, I guess all bets are off, but should their 'source code' (or exact plans/designs) be automatically made public? and who do we trust to hold these? hmmm... I personally think that would be excessive.