Is "EMI" the English company, "Electrical and
Musical Industries" that sell music recordings and the like? They're one of
the bunch that's klumping around trying to make life difficult for file sharers.
I don't want to get into the merits and ethics of file sharing except to point
out that a lot of material that's out there is historic and much is in now in
the public domain but these companies don't respect this -- they assume that
they have the right to hold and enforce copyright over
everything indefinitely (unfortunately they've already managed to extend
these timelines over the horizon). This might be good for their bottom line but
it has a very negative effect on our culture.
Its strange that anyone at Lockeed/Martin or
any similar company could put monetary value on these
old designs. There's no value at all -- they're part of the historic
record, of our culture, but they're worthless beyond that. Nobody in their right
minds would build a copy of a P-38 or an Electra for day to day use, the
technology's long obsolete. They're just an icon of that era. If I were a LM
shareholder I'd be a bit concerned about this because it suggests that the
company's suffering financial stress -- this attempt to license these designs to
hobbyists is the corporate equivalent of rummaging through the sofa for loose
change.
Martin Usher
