I can't imagine why anyone would bother pirating plans since authentic copies are not exactly expensive. I can only imagine that they're obselete -- out of print articles, that sort of thing -- and they're put out in case someone was interested.
I'm not condoning this, though. Its wrong to improperly profit from other people's work, IMO, even though its a common enough practise. (I think the biggest offender is sheet music -- you take something someone composed a couple of hundred years ago, add a couple of tempo marks and copyright the thing anew.) It would help if people who have published plans in the past either put them in the public domain or out under one of the licencing schemes that are used for things like open source software. They have no commercial value but they're part of our collective historical record and making them available not only preserves that record but makes it impossible for someone else to reinvent them and claim the work as original. Martin Usher [I think the current policies of publishers that are geared towards opaque media and restricted access will wreak enormous damage on our culture.....a new Dark Age. Very little that we create is truly new, nearly everything is derived from something that came before and we should admit this rather than trying to convince the world (and ourselves) that we're really that clever.] 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.
