Legal question - Licensing Agreement

G'day Fred

Dunno where the Fast bit came from?

Just as well you don't call yerself Reading Fred.

I'm not talking about copyright, I made that clear.

Onlee jokin Fred I bet yer reeel intelijunt.

Poida

 

JFWIW
A well known design that became an International success story by a notable New Zealand designer was it stolen or was it the clients to produce modify or whatever they so desired....

 

outside the box, interesting read. A question arose:

Who will hold China accountable for their blatant theft and infringement of copyrighted material?

 

The Kiwi client took production to China so presumably the Kiwi client should still be accountable at law in Kiwi land one would think.... I have know idea who is correct and who is not but just as a general thing one would think Designer should have had the right to have held the exclusive right to his design and the client should have paid royalty for anything other than one build.... a loop hole if ever their was one to be exploited by a client (dodgy client or not) perhaps....
It does make interesting reading that designer quoted ("I designed the boat, taught the owner much about modern composite fiberglass techniques, supervised the build process, sailed the prototype and was involved in the changes to bring the boat to a production standard)" and the client assumed this was all done for a fee of only NZ $500.00....... to my mind this gives insight to the fact the designer expected more to be built than one and the royality would have been fairly expected..... who knows who is correct and who is not...Lawyers feast on this sort of thing that we regular everyday Joe blows take for granted that the right thing is done on a hand shake....

 

Poida, you can't just go and compare dress patterns, clock patterns and boat patterns and think they are all handled the same. To take a silly example, if I bought a cookbook I'd be pretty pissed if it said I could only make one meatloaf. But with boat plans it is standard practice. If a country won't protect the seller then the seller shouldn't do business there if it's important to him. I would be inclined to counter with a request that as long as I didn't transfer possession of the boat, I could continue to use the plans to maintain one boat for myself. So if the one burned or got wrecked, I could replace it. The new one would have a different reg. no. and be insured differently and be identifiable as a different boat, but still covered under the license.

 

Yes you are being silly Phil, because recipes can't be copywritten.

 

I love the bit
"Save for one component which will be discussed subsequently, the Court found that Digga’s manufacture of substantially identical components fell within the exemptions to copyright infringement. However that did not get Digga off the hook as in the process of manufacturing those components Digga, of necessity, had to prepare drawings and the Court held that in relation to those drawings, the copyright had been infringed."

Frog4 - you are being very 'glass half full'. I bet you only paid a few hundred dollars for a design that probably would have cost thousands of dollars to develop from scratch.

Likewise, we all pay hundreds of dollars for software that costs millions of dollars to develop.

Licensing is a great concept, and generally allows people to spend a lot of time and effort developing much better things knowing they will be re-imbursed.

 

No, that is is not correct.

You get to build 1 boat, and 1 boat only from most plan sellers.

Its not the same as software where you have the right to use the product as long as you have the licence. (Microsoft will even send you new disks)

 

Interestingly but slightly off topic, if you have registered you IP in China (possibly not copyright) the Chinese authorities are more than helpful when it comes to stopping the infringement. The problem that most have though is that they design and patent something in NA or Europe but not in China... Legally there is no reason why the item could not be duplicated in China at all, it is then up to the IP owners/government or whoever else to protect their their IP by preventing the importation.

I would have guessed with your boat plans, that if it wasnt stated that you were buying a license to build one boat as opposed to buying a set of plans (the copyright to a copy of the set of plans) it would be very much like buying a pattern book as described above. There is no IP on the boat design itself unless it is a registered design (maybe a design patent in other countries).

What seems kind of strange is that say you did buy the rights to make one boat from the plans that were supplied, you cant make any more of this boat without buying a further license, however as far as I can tell there is no law to stop someone else splashing your boat and building one (or as many as they want!) assuming that it is not a registered design.

 

rwatson,

what I said was-

 

Turns out, it's a blatant rip-off of a craft designed in Holland ... exact lines, displacement, everything ... one change, these are for a wooden build and the originals are steel built ...

 

Conversion to a different process is legitimate IP as far as I'm concerned. Protecting a shape is something of an IP bugaboo.

 

ahhhh - that makes more sense. One must read the detail fully. Hmm, sounds like a case for licence agreements

 

regarding waikikin's post and reference-

an excerpt-

my opinion- This blows. Where on earth do they get the idea that the potential for artistic expression is constrained by a design brief? The person who wrote the legal brief basically says that artistic content times design constraints = constant. Ok, so the court may be reasoning that the construction of the the racing rule or other design goal is itself a work of artistic-craftsmanship and any compliant design is only an attempt to utilize this art. Since when is art a zero sum game? Is the performance of a boat during a race determined by a point cloud? does art not motivate the crew, the owners, the sponsors? When did art become detrimental to competition? What if they showed that they had expenditures in excess of that needed to meet the rule. That could be presented as evidence of artistic content, for lack of a better metric.

It would be interesting to see the specs on a contract for replacing a stained glass window in a cathedral and replacing a big bay window in a house. Which would have the tighter specs? Does that imply greater or lesser freedom of expression?

What if I contract for a statue. It has to be smaller than a certain size. It must be made of certain stuff. It should withstand a certain environment. I guess it isn't art anymore. I suggest that any creation can "be claimed to be the subject of works of artistic craftmanship." It is for the court to decide on a case by case basis. How on earth can art be handled any other way.

Perhaps there was a better way for the plaintiff to protect his IP, but having failed to avail himself of it , he was left grasping at straws. Nevertheless, I think dismissing an object's potential for artistic content because it is well suited to a functional requirement is just plain daft.

 

Yes... clearly no judges who are boat owners on that bench, otherwise they might have recognised that there is art in almost every design... not all of it good, I will grant!

In terms of the OP, I agree that it would have been considerate for the people from whom the plans were boughtto make the one-build situation clear before the deal was done. I guess it is such a widely accepted convention that they didn't think to mention it....