Search for ethics!

[Boa-Tr]

Dear All,

I'm a new user to this community, and would like to learn and address everybody on an important discussion, hopefully not only for me. I made a quick research in the forum but couldn't find any discussion about this subject. What is the subject?! Design rights, copyrights, how to protect your designs???

As a Naval Architect and Marine Engineer living in Turkey, I would like to learn how do everybody manage this important subject in other countries. After learning this from your valuable comments, I think we can all find out an international and local approach. I'm not talking about a best idea contest, but we need solution(s). Every idea will trigger better ones.

This subject is important for us. We need to protect our designs. But keeping our designs only to ourselves is not a solution. We need to let people know what we do.

Here is a story that we are used to. Potential customer approaches the designer to produce a boat. Designer produces an arrangement and a styling. Potential customer comes to the office. Makes some comments, learns your approach. Filters some details, motivates you to work more. You start working harder. Than comes to the office again to start bargaining and take a copy of your GA, and still motivates you that he/she would like to go on with your company. Than disappears. Somehow after sometime, you learn from people that a boat construction has started somewhere close to your company. You go there and see from the drawings that the design is yours!! The customer has approached to a cheaper place with your GA. Made some small (not major) changes, started the construction. The end.

If this happens once, you can ignore and go on with your life, but keep talking about this everywhere you go just to let people know the unethical behavior of both the customer and the cheap designer/builder.
If this happens more, would you just sit and wait for ethics?

Here is the next best story. Somehow one day you see the same boat that you have designed and built sometime ago. You think that it was an illusion/hallucination or whatever. You start searching and find out that it is not an illusion. It is the same boat, but designer is somebody else on paper with the same subcontractor that you worked with, when building the original boat. Is this ethics? You try to solve this and go to law, but they tell you that the original boat is 5 cm smaller so you can not do anything. On the other hand any neutral eye can see that the design is stolen!! from yours.
So please tell me where is ethics, and if we can not find a solution to this, why do people need to behave ethical?
I'm sure that this is not a problem only for boat designers. This is a problem for every designer.

The basic solution is to go to approval offices when you make a new design, but you can not pay to approval offices every time to protect what you do. It is not feasible, and you have to pay to these offices more than you can earn from your projects, especially these days. What is the solution? How is this done in your countries?

[frank smith]

Roark would blow it up .

Frank

Hey, you are in Turkey, what did you expect? Honest business?

Even in the countries with proper developed ethics in business, that happens. In Turkey thats everyday life to steal and copy everything.
80% of the boats built in Tuzla are stolen designs.


This topic (how to protect plans) was handled in several threads here. When you search for "copyright" some will pop up! But you will find the conclusion is:
You cannot protect plans.


Regards
Richard

[gonzo]

Use the approach called "Show me the money". If they don't want to pay, they are wasting your time.

[narwhal]

It's the same story in building construction here in the US as well, from houses to offices to churches.

Theft of intellectual property can be difficult to prosecute, and the cost of legal remedy is often greater than the loss.

[Kaluvic]

We have a small R&D company in the PI.
When a prospective customer comes along, they generally have us sign a Non Disclosure agreement before they divulge their "great idea"
We'll do a very preliminary review and comment for free....after that any future time spent is against an advance payment.
Step by step we move ahead....if they take our work and proceed without us or through another party, we aren’t out anything….They have paid for what they have.

For our own in-house projects....we don’t tell anyone anything until we have secured a non disclosure or submitted to the patent office.

[Boa-Tr]

Yes I think we all know that regardless of development level of the countries this is everywhere. I don't think that accusing a majority of designers/builders in a specific country is nice. I need answers to change something instead of nationalist approaches. What I need is more concrete answers, how about the rules of originality?? What I mean is: What makes a "copy of a design" a copy in your country? What makes it original? Is it the length/beam, stability information or view? View is very wide expression, I need more specific information, and I thank to anyone who will lead me with links or any experience. Experience is really a leading info for this kind of problems. If there is a solution, how did you experience it?

[Boa-Tr]

Originally Posted by Kaluvic

We have a small R&D company in the PI.
When a prospective customer comes along, they generally have us sign a Non Disclosure agreement before they divulge their "great idea"
We'll do a very preliminary review and comment for free....after that any future time spent is against an advance payment.
Step by step we move ahead....if they take our work and proceed without us or through another party, we aren’t out anything….They have paid for what they have.

For our own in-house projects....we don’t tell anyone anything until we have secured a non disclosure or submitted to the patent office.

This is a good idea actually. In a very different business. Real estate agencies here in Turkey started doing this about 10 years ago. Some of the house owners were not trusting the agencies, so they gave their house keys to different agencies. After this not so ethical approach, agencies started showing houses to potential customers after signing a contract that proves that they showed that house, not any other agency.

Thank you. This is a good solution, I think.

Originally Posted by Boa-Tr

I don't think that accusing a majority of designers/builders in a specific country is nice. I need answers to change something instead of nationalist approaches.

There was no such approach mate! I build boats in Turkey since more than 30 years.
Owning yards in Tuzla, Izmir and Antalya, I am pretty sure I can tell you more about the way business goes there than you could tell me, sorry.

But to you question.
There is NO WAY to protect your designs, no matter where you are, or do business.
A nondisclosure, non circumventing contract is just paper, nothing else.

Get your fees paid in advance for every step you take, thats it. Nothing else.

Regards
Richard

[ancient kayaker]

Had the same problem myself although not in boat design. In my experience it was more prevalent in Europe and Asia, where I learned that nothing should be revealed until the lawyers have had there say, at least in the business I was in. Half the time a project took was spent protecting one's intellectual rights and ensuring one was in a proper sue-worthy situation before the work could start; any exchange of knowledge or concepts before that was considered fair game. This does not make for an efficient work culture.

In N. America ethical standards seem to be worth something, although not in the law and banking businesses!

Apex is right, thre is no way to be completely safe except the pay as you go route.

[PAR]

or politics Terry . . .

[Boa-Tr]

Originally Posted by apex1

There was no such approach mate! I build boats in Turkey since more than 30 years.
Owning yards in Tuzla, Izmir and Antalya, I am pretty sure I can tell you more about the way business goes there than you could tell me, sorry.

But to you question.
There is NO WAY to protect your designs, no matter where you are, or do business.
A nondisclosure, non circumventing contract is just paper, nothing else.

Get your fees paid in advance for every step you take, thats it. Nothing else.

Regards
Richard

Thank you Richard, I will listen to the experince and I will think about this. I don't know how to do but I'm sure that there is a way. I'm sure of one thing that this is definetly not a "one man show" to solve. This is a big step if it can be done.
Thanks all, Please keep me posted if you have any further opinions.

Well Terry,

coming from a City where multi million businesses are still today sealed by a handshake only, I´m not comfortable with the lawyers involved. In the end I had to find out, the more of them are part of the game, the more ways to screw the business are the result.

Hamburg survived two wars as one of the shipping metropoles of the world.
Still is the wealthiest place in the entire world.

That was not coincidence, that was based on centuries of honest business done by our predecessors.
1000 years of trading over sea, makes a open horizon and a clear imagination of the way to handle businesses.
Such culture is just not found in many places.


Boa,

you will not solve the problem. None of us could solve it in the past, and most of us are in their business for many decades.
Do business with honest people, thats the first point, or get paid in advance, thats the other.

Regards
Richard

[ancient kayaker]

Richard,

maybe Hamburg is a place of trust and honest dealing, but my first experience of business in Germany was not like that at all. I fixed up a cooperative deal with a large, internationally-known and long-established German company to bid on a system and submitted a fairly detailed system design showing how I proposed to handle my half of the business. My "partner" got the job alright, but my half of the job went to another German company literally on the same street. My proposal "did not conform to requirements" I was advised. Later, through my many friends working with the customer I determined that they had given my entire concept to the other company who had used it almost verbatim. This was my first experience of doing business with Europeans and definitely my last attempt to do business there in such a trustful way, you can be sure. Naturally letters of intent and other legal instruments are employed in NA but emphasis is more on non-disclosure of shared know-how than preventing the other partner from shopping around for a deal with local buddies using free technical input from foreign suckers.

Sad to hear that Terry.

Of course we have bastards in every country around the world.

On the other side, German shipping companies still order ships at German yards by telephone, or handshake!
Not possible in the US, and sure not in Turkey.

There is a association in Hamburg named "Versammlung Eines Ehrbaren Kaufmanns zu Hamburg e. V." it does exist since 1517.
The translation of the name roughly means "association of the reputable merchants of Hamburg".
It first was a Commercial Deputation, which established what today is known as the Chamber of Commerce, along with the stock exchange in Hamburg 1558.

Membership is exclusively open for Merchants of Hamburg. Membership is cancelled when another member claims to be overreached by him.

I am a proud Member of this Versammlung since 1971.

Regards
Richard