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
