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."

Comments

Safety concerns driving this

[starseeker]

"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.

Re:Pacific Fighters

[jcr]

They may have deals in place to exclusively sell to the US military, but that doesnt make the military own the design.

Actually, it's the development contracts that make the designs the property of the United States. Ever since WW I, the US military has had standard clauses in procurement contracts to ensure that they could have the aircraft built by any vendor(s) they chose. In practice, that right has only been exercised in wartime, since the costs of getting a second source spun up are pretty steep.

-jcr

Re:That would just make a patent system

[cpt kangarooski]

Neither should require a lot of money, but both should require some money. Copyrights and patents are economic incentives; they are only useful to authors who plan to make money from their work, or inventors who plan to make money from their invention. Authors or inventors who are motivated to do the same work without the incentive of copyrights or patents should not get them, as they'd be superfluous and harmful to the public without any public benefit. Requiring some small hurdle to be cleared by the rights claimant is a good way of finding out whether or not they care, and thus whether or not they were incentivized. If someone can't be bothered to fill out the paperwork and pay a token fee then the public can't be bothered with giving them unasked for rights.

Re:I don't know why it's so damned hard...

[evilviper]

The same argument was (is?) used with regards to things like NES/SNES roms, but now Nintendo is reselling the games (virtual console).

Just because you CAN find another way to squeeze a few more dollars out of the current copyright scheme, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

Even though it might cost the copyright holders a little bit of money, I believe the OP has a reasonable scheme...

I'd also be happy with copyright renewal every 5 or 10 years... So anything not worth the registration fee to the owner (who may no longer even exist), becomes public domain automatically.

Of course, just stopping the infinite retroactively applied copyright extensions, and going back to a 20 year maximum, would be even better.

Re:Pacific Fighters

[zippthorne]

If they're smart they'll talk Grumman into a very low/nonexistent license fee since a game is also an advertisement for the company's designs. Very much like 90% of the car-games on PS2 are thinly disguised ads. Similarly Lockheed. Whatever fees they could extract from the game are likely insignificant compared to their core businesses regardless.

Also, they may be able to purchase the rights from the US Government, depending on how their agreements with Lockheed, Grumman are worded. I'm sure they'd be interested in whatever potential recruiting tools they can develop.

NEA is included, absolutely.

[Kadin2048]

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.