Re: [RCSE] The muddy field of copying
On Thursday 10 February 2005 17.10, you wrote: When the Russians stole the general arrangement plans of the Concorde A more charitable interpretation of this is that both the Russian and the English/French teams had similar problems to solve with similar tools so they came up with similar solutions. The legacy of the Cold War is such that we refuse to admit that the Russians had any signifcant technical capability -- they must have stolen it -- but there's ample evidence to the contrary. Actually it was Tupolev Jr that said it himself; that they had pretty good general arrangement plans and also detail plans of certain systems, in a very good documentary done a few years back, beginning and ending with the famous flights by NASA-equipped Tu-144 for studies of second generation SSTs. Tupolev also said that the wing planform was too complex for their time schedule, so they opted for a double delta, not unlike the wing of a Saab Draken! That the Tupolev crashed in Paris was definitely caused by the French, and afterwards the Soviet and French authorities cooked up a weird story that it was the fault of one of the Russians aboard, that his film camera had blocked the controls! When they asked the firemen who dug out the remains of the cockpit from a house everyone was in his seat, and nobody had been standing up and there was no film camera either! When they cornered a French official he first kept to the original story, but eventually owed up that it had been a fake story, so to not worsen the relations between the two countries. Nobody thought anything about blaming an innocent man, evidently! It was BBC that made the program. I think. There's a widely held misunderstanding about what's actually invovled in creating things that's causing inflated expectations about what an idea is and how much its worth. Changes in patent and copyright law have reinforced this, those changes being institued because they suit corporate interests (IMO). Creating the form is often the easy bit. Getting the form into a realizable state, getting it manufactured, getting it marketed and delivered to willing customers and supporting it is where the work is. We're getting lazy -- we expect others to do this for us for peanuts so we can profit from our genius, complaining loudly to all when people cut us out as unnecessary (you could call it the real hidden danger in outsourcing!). Couldn't have said it better myself :-)! Lots of good products never becomes a commercial success because they get those factors wrong. Look at all aircraft projects in the US the last twenty years, where new companies emerge with new, better aircraft, but fail anyway! A handful get it right, and survive, like Lancair and a few others, while heaps never make it: Avtec, Omac The list is very long! A few designs become immortal, like the Taylorcraft, that we see to this day in various forms: J-2, J-3 (Cub), Auster, plus a lot of ultralight copies, while some, like the pretty Beechcraft Starship One, never became a commercial success (today all remaining Starships have been returned to Beechcraft, to avoid litigations). Martin Usher BTW -- LM and the companies that they sold the design rights to are cheeky. We (the taxpayer) have already paid them for this work. The problem isn't really LM, its the companies that bought the rights with the expectation of profiting from sub-licencing. Its our duty to make this business unprofitable otherwise we're be spending the rest of time fighing off parasitic protection rackets. Hear, hear! Tord 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
Re: [RCSE] The muddy field of copying
Tord Eriksson wrote: In my younger years I worked at a famous design department and I assure you that copying goes on all the time. Its a normal design tool. One of my first electronics textbooks talked about it as the primary design tool -- they actually used the word plagurism in a tounge-in-cheek context. They said that as this was a textbook the student was expected to do everything from first principles but this wasn't how things were done in real life. When the Russians stole the general arrangement plans of the Concorde A more charitable interpretation of this is that both the Russian and the English/French teams had similar problems to solve with similar tools so they came up with similar solutions. The legacy of the Cold War is such that we refuse to admit that the Russians had any signifcant technical capability -- they must have stolen it -- but there's ample evidence to the contrary. There's a widely held misunderstanding about what's actually invovled in creating things that's causing inflated expectations about what an idea is and how much its worth. Changes in patent and copyright law have reinforced this, those changes being institued because they suit corporate interests (IMO). Creating the form is often the easy bit. Getting the form into a realizable state, getting it manufactured, getting it marketed and delivered to willing customers and supporting it is where the work is. We're getting lazy -- we expect others to do this for us for peanuts so we can profit from our genius, complaining loudly to all when people cut us out as unnecessary (you could call it the real hidden danger in outsourcing!). Martin Usher BTW -- LM and the companies that they sold the design rights to are cheeky. We (the taxpayer) have already paid them for this work. The problem isn't really LM, its the companies that bought the rights with the expectation of profiting from sub-licencing. Its our duty to make this business unprofitable otherwise we're be spending the rest of time fighing off parasitic protection rackets. 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
[RCSE] The muddy field of copying
In my younger years I worked at a famous design department and I assure you that copying goes on all the time. Just as us amateurs borrow details we liked from models we've built before, professional designers do the same. If you're an optics designer you look through lapsed patents to see if there is anything there you could use, if you're designing the rear view mirror of a truck you check what the competition are up to, and steal those ideas you like, in a slightly modified form, and so on. When the Russians stole the general arrangement plans of the Concorde, they realized that their manufacturing skills in all departments were not quite up to the Brits and Frogs level, and besides they were behind time-wise and were ordered to fly first, so they simply used a simplified design, with a few work-arounds - the fuel trimming system of the Concorde was replaced by a highly advanced, retractable, canard with double-slotted flaps, et cetera. And how many models isn't there out there copying the Zagi, or the Lazy Bee? And for scale models there can be very little you can do if someone makes a mold from your model, that in turn is a scaled down copy of the real thing?! As long as the innards are different of the resulting model I doubt that anyone can do anything about it! And copying doesn't need to be done as crudely as making a plug out of a commercial kit; you could simply do a 3-D scan of the fuselage and wings and then make your own copy a little bigger, or smaller, just as you like, with little extra work involved! If your scanner is big enough you can scan the full-size aircraft, of course! What one shouldn't do is to copy the mechanical solutions inside the kit, unless they are old and proven. Just as with chip production reverse engineering is perfectly legal, as long as the end result has taken another route to get there! In software this is a problem, as a routine written by someone can easily be stolen as it is, and reused and then compiled into something the original author wouldn't recognise. The type of GUI (Graphic User Interface, like Windows) we all are used to today were originally created by Xerox research teams, but were quickly stolen by Apple and Microsoft, to mention a few, while the three-button mouse was originally treated as a hot potato (being a mechanical device) and wasn't stolen till later :-)! Still think Lockheed are nuts, period! Tord 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
