KRnetHeads, I ran across my KR Newsletter stash a few weeks ago, and was reminded what a gold-mine they are of building information, as well as history of the design and the people that have helped to improve them over the years. Half of all content is filling in the missing details and "a better way to do it" of the plans we've all bought and used. I have no doubt that reading all these newsletters will result in a better and quicker built, more efficient, and safer airplane. To give you an idea of how much stuff I'm talking about, and I have them all, and if you took the paper out of the binders the stack would be 8" thick, single sided...roughly 2000 pages. That's a lot of info, and it's not just applicable to KRs, much of it is applicable to homebuilding in general.
So... I've started back on a rant that I've had for years...since those newsletters were created mostly by the contributors, and the information is so invaluable, why are they simply "unavailable" now? Surely there's a way to get these back out to the KR community. Nowhere in the newsletters does it say it's copyrighted, so I checked at the US Copyright Office database, and sure enough, no record of it. There is language in the newsletters that "any reproduction without written permission will be considered copyright infringement, and subject to aggressive legal action", but it doesn't come out and say that it IS copyrighted, and after doing some research on it, I'm still fuzzy on whether or not you even can copyright a monthly compilation "club" newsletter based on contributor input anyway. So I called several of the five former newsletter editors to discuss this. I was told that they were NOT copyrighted, and that the copyright notice was just there to keep people honest. After all, these editors did put a lot of their own efforts into these newsletters, and didn't deserve to have somebody copy them and freely distribute them back in the day...the Newsletter would have died, and therefore served nobody. But fast forward several years, and back issues are now unavailable from ANY source. I was assured that nobody was going to pursue legal action if those newsletters were copied and distributed to the community, even if they had been copyrighted. The most recent editor only published two newsletters, scanned all the old newsletters and sold them on CD, and then essentially "turned out the lights". He deserved to be paid for his efforts, and he did sell a lot of CDs, but he is now nowhere to be found. I haven't heard from him in years and he left no forwarding address, and his house is now in the hands of other owners. So I've removed the dead link from the www.krnet.org website, and assume he has gleaned all the fruit he expected from that tree. I believe this opens the door to a community effort to make the KR Newsletters available to all members of the community FREE. Mark Lougheed scanned the first 87 of them back in the 90's (with direct permission from the founding editor), but I'm pretty sure they were from copies, rather than originals, and scanner technology and optical character recognition (OCR) have come a long way since then, so there's room for improvement. Many of the photos are severely lacking in tonal range, as they say. As a long-time subscriber, I have most of the "originals", but my early ones are repros too, and the detail in the photos leaves a lot to be desired. I'm looking for originals (those mailed directly to you) from the first one up through newsletter number 30, really just the ones with photos. These would be borrowed for a short period and returned. The goal is to create a text searchable PDF file that will eventually be kept on www.krnet.org and freely distributed to builders. For those who haven't seen them, Mark Lougheed's 1-87 have been at http://www.bouyea.net/digests/kr01-87.pdf for many years now, although I am unable to open it at the moment. We owe a lot to the editors for their tireless efforts to improve this airplane. The least we can do is preserve and distribute this group effort from all those contributors for the benefit of future builders. One more thing...feel free to keep me out of trouble here...somebody who's more familiar with the copyright database is welcome to double-check my search, and ensure there is nothing in there regarding the KR Newsletter. Anybody with good quality early issues is welcome to contact me offline. Thanks a lot, Mark Langford ML at N56ML.com website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
