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FAA To Free Aircraft Hobbled By IP Laws
smellsofbikes writes "The FAA is attempting to develop a legal process that will allow them to release data about vintage aircraft designs that have obviously been abandoned. Existing laws restrict the FAA's ability to release this data because it is deemed to be intellectual property even though the owner of record has long since ceased to exist. This is fundamentally the same problem that copyright laws impose on people looking for out-of-print books. But in the case of vintage aircraft, the owners are legally required to maintain them to manufacturer specifications that the owners cannot legally obtain: an expensive and potentially lethal dilemma. If the FAA, notoriously hidebound and conservative, is willing to find a solution to this IP Catch-22, maybe the idea will catch on in other places."
I always wanted to build a War World I biplane. Those vintage stealth designs are hard to come by.
Sadly, this will be too late for Oleg Maddox's Pacific Fighters simulation. Northrop Grumman have been bastards and refused to let 1C:Games use models of N-G aircraft and ships without paying a license fee--something that started when Lockheed claimed the F-22 as their intellectual property, never mind that it's been bought and paid for by the US government.
Results of this include there being no Yorktown-class model in the sim, nor the TBF Avenger, and I think no more American warplanes beyond the ones initially shipped; contrast this to Soviet, German, Italian, and Japanese a/c being added in patches.
About time, though.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"Data could be released provided the following circumstances are met: The certificate containing the requested data is inactive for at least three years; the TC owner of record, or the owner of record's heir, cannot not be located; and the designation of such data as public data will enhance aviation safety."
This is a good step, but it seems to pertain to safety concerns much more than "hobbiest" concerns, which was my first thought when I saw "vintage." (It would be really cool to see, say, original blueprints in svg format for the first commercial airplanes, but good luck getting either access to such information or right to do anything with it.)
I doubt the logic used in this process could be generalized to copyright in general (probably the issue of most interest to slashdot), since it's pretty hard to argue that (for example) old software manuals for a long dead image editing system could pertain to public safety. They might be very well written and a good starting point for new efforts, but the benefits of that are much more indirect.
I think the loss of old documents and knowledge is a very unfortunate thing - there is a certain logic to IP holdings of companies that have "lapsed" or vanished becoming defunct in order to allow the knowledge and resources to be used for further progress. Of course, that would require uniquely identifying IP created by that company as opposed to being licensed from somewhere else, virtually impossible without good records. A nasty situation.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
It seems awfully simple to me, really. If something, whether it be blueprints, books, records or whatnot is not available via the marketplace from any supplier, there seems to be little financial damage done to anyone when someone duplicates 'em.
So all of the fine speak about protecting people's 'Intellectual Property' rights, which really come down to allowing a form of legalized monopoly to allow an originator to profit, becomes entirely moot.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
In a better world than this one, copyright holders would have to pay a fee and register their works. If they can't be bothered, why should we bother pretending that they care?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The FAA, possibly even more notorious for their dislike of aircraft crashing, even old ones?
"The plane is not safe to fly until the weight of the paperwork exceeds that of the aircraft." They are merely helping themselves;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Patents require a lot of money and thus are exclusive to those that can afford them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Wrong thread, buddy. This is the World War I biplane enthusiasts thread, where we like our whores to be carrying real bazookas and not bags of sand.
This would be a good way to bring old aircraft back to life. There are lots of people who have old aircraft that have a lot of trouble keeping them functioning. Now, homebuilders could conceivably make true-to-spec replicas of early aircraft. I'm sure the Save A Connie people over in Kansas City are going to be happy about this as well.
The more of the monied bourgeoise who get bit in the ass hard from bogus IP nonsense the better. Needs to happen, in a variety of ways. Then maybe they will pay more attention to the practices of the corporations in their "investment portfolios" and the political parties and candidates they support. I want Vista to bite them in the ass, I want their iPods, or their whinny fat kids iPods not working to annoy them, I want their big screen TVs that won't play new media to make them pissed off, and etc. The "status quo" with richer farts in the top few percent of the economic food chain has gotten us to where we are now with the patent and copyright system broken well beyond any reasonableness.
And until guys with cash (if you restore old airplanes for a fuck around hobby you aren't hurting at all, so don't even say you come close, you are in the top on the planet earth right now and in the top 5% in the US most likely, well above median payscale at mid 40s range) start to get pissed off about events this crap will just keep getting worse and worse, and THEY have to realize THEY have been part of the problem by "investing" in the problems and "buying into" the problems and enjoying just a lot of profit from the problems that have been affecting everyone. If it takes their hobby being "harder" to get them to wakeup-so be it.
But if Northrop Grumman doesn't get paid for gamers to use their models, then what possible incentive could Northrop Grumman have, so that they would ever bother to apply for government contracts to design and build fighters in exchange for billions and billions of dolla-- oh, wait.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This should be the case in every digital IP field:
music, video games, television, movies, etc., etc., etc.
If it's not worth enough to an organization to continue making an item available for sale, then how can the item have enough value to protect?
And if the item becomes popular again in the future, it is almost always a derivative work anyway.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Remember Pearl Harbor? Guys manning a RADAR facility observed the inbound Japanese and called it in. Some pencilneck decided to ignore the report.
In WW2 both sides were using radar to detect inbound bombers. Radar was also used to search for ships and submarines.
The real issue is that aircraft played a relatively insignificant role during World War 1. By the second war aviation technology had advanced to where aircraft could easily destroy enemy surface resources.
Of course, I still want to build my own Jenny. But I will put a modern engine on the front...
Boeing built a "prototype" without a horizontal tail piece. They were going to add one for the final version.
Well gee. That's a whole different plane. You might as well be changing the number of engines, switching from aluminum to composite, or putting canards on the front.
With all the calculators?
Ten years. And that's for a plane that effectively stopped existing three or four years before I even started the quest.
(In the end, I did obtain some very basic plans for the airframe and wings, from the Windsor Bomber Group, but only because they wanted me to do some data conversion for them. I still don't have nearly enough information to even build a basic flight sim model.)
For more "in demand" designs - stuff that would have enough value to hobbyists to be able to bleed 'em dry for parts to keep to FAA safety standards - there is not a hope in hell you'll ever see those plans, whatever the FCC may rule. When it's a choice beyween your life and their wallet, it doesn't take a genius to figure out which the corps are going to side with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I guess copyright is more dangerous than we thought . . .
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Of course - there has to be a publication that lists works that are ripe for losing the IP ownership so that anybody that may have claims can oppose the release. The opposing part has to provide reasonable documentation regarding the claim within a reasonable timeframe (not more than six months) or the opposition has to be dropped.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What about works funded by the NEA?
I would argue that if you take taxpayer dollars for your art project, then (in the same way that the software that I write at work belongs to my company, not to me) it's basically a government work, done on commission. If you don't like that, don't take the cash. Nobody ever said that cash handouts should come without strings attached; actually, as long as the government is giving away my tax dollars, I'd prefer that they attach enough strings to make sure that the public has the greatest possible benefit. And ensuring that everything produced ends up in the public domain would be a good way to ensure that.
I could probably be argued to compromise on something that gave the author a short-term period of exclusivity, say 5 or 10 years, but nothing like the current copyright span. (I could also see giving the same terms to recipients of scientific grants; i.e., you have 5 years to publish your results in any journal you want, but at the end of that span, it needs to be submitted to a central database and all findings become public domain material. The journals would bitch and moan, but they'd have to bend over and deal, or become irrelevant; government funding drives too much science for them to ignore or blackball it.)
A good model for what the NEA could become, would be the photographic projects commissioned by the FSA in the 1930s, which included work by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, or the Department of the Interior's commissioning of Ansel Adams in the 1940s (the Manzanar photos). In both cases, the works produced ended up in the public domain and are now freely available (online and in hardcopy). Had the tactics common today been used, most of the works would still be under copyright, and few Americans would ever have seen them. (And, it goes almost without saying, many of them would probably be gone forever.) Projects like these should be the rule where government funding of the arts is concerned, rather than the exception.
I would rather see the NEA fund a smaller number of works more completely, and have the output free for anyone to view, copy, reuse, distribute, and modify, than fund a large number of works halfassedly, without regard to what the public can do with the output, as currently seems to be the case. As it stands right now, the NEA is practically regressive; it uses taxpayer dollars to fund projects that only a small percentage of citizens (generally those in higher income brackets anyway) really care about. If the government is funding Art, then the resulting artworks should belong to all the people, to do whatever they want with it. If artists don't want to give the People their art, they don't have to take the People's cash.
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Seems to me General motors doesn't care about any Minivan designs that won't earn a 5 Star crash test rating, so can they please just give out the designs so the third world can start producing them?
Everything points to North America (And much of the developed world) switching to hydrogen or bio-fuels in the next few years.
They could give out the plans for their car from 5 years ago and it wouldn't be competition by the time other companies got their manufacturing working.
All I want to know is - will they release the plans for the fairey rotodyne?
I gotta get me one of those...
This is simply criminal! The FAA must be stopped from doing this. If they carry on down this road, then the ultimate end will be the destruction of the use-once-only airplane we all know and love and it's replacement with some shoddy horrible clap-trap assembly of a resusable airplane. Not only would you not get that "fresh paint" smell when you board your pristine plane at the terminal, but your little bits of pornography stashed down the side of the seat could be found by the next person to use the plane.
I say that we should defend to the death the right to fly on a brand new plane every time that we fly, and to know that the plane will be destroyed, smashed and rendered into small particles of road-covering by third-world pollution eaters at the end of our journey.
I think this is some sort of Marxist-Leninist plot to outsource the jobs of our poor underpaid aircraft builders and potentially to replace them with massively overpaid (and probably filthy, and foreign !!!) cleaning staff. Who would probably be unionised too.
The whole idea of a "reusable" aircraft is horrible. It's the transportation equivalent of renting a condom at the cash desk of a busy brothel.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"