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I recently emailed Ray Charles over at 26 decals inquiring about the availability of decals for United Airlines L-1011-500 and was told that he isn’t going to produce any more Lockheed products due to a cease and desist notice from Lockheed attorneys. Anyone else know anything about this and why Lockheed is taking drastic actions like this towards the modeling community?
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Surprising, considering that L/M hasn’t built a passenger aircraft in decades. Not surprising, considering
they reside in Litigation Land (USA). One wonders how they’re on board with EE doing the models, unless they’ve
already received a sum for that.
Alan Aronoff
Where there's a will, there's a relative.Well, here come the bean counters, again…
-Dana
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Difficult to appreciate this. I can understand an airline trying to charge a royalty for their logo even though it is free advertising and benefits them. But not the manufacturer of the aircraft, at least not for decals. A kit perhaps but not an airlines decals on a model. The L1011-500 has also been used in the military and I thought, although perhaps wrongly that once that happens it becomes fair game. Mind you I am admittedly ignorant in these matters. Boeing I believe does the same thing which is why Zvezda has the logo on their box that states approval by Boeing as a licensed product for the 737s and other kits they sell. I just thought that the industry was moving beyond this ignorance, and clearly I was wrong. This is not good news at all for our hobby.
Jaime Diaz
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Ben (v1decals) had the same issue, we chatted about this months ago, i was able to read a letter Lockheed attorneys sent him,
seemed pretty serious thing. Too bad for them and for us .
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Lockheed also treats their contractors like they’re disposable. I realize that’s why they hire contractors, so the rate you’re willing to accept has to be factored into that. Still, I was brought in to MFC (Missles & Fire Control in Orlando) to make a presentation to a potential customer look better (see! We have 30! 30 engineers ready to productize our prototype for you. When the sale didn’t go through, those 30 engineers became 3.) I have vowed to never accept a contract with Lockheed ever again, and will be looking for a max rate from any of the others. And we wonder why it cost a trillion and a half to produce the F-35, okay I don’t. But some people do.
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Welcome to the USA where Capitalism holds sway. These companies are not anti hobby ! . They are just trying to cover their asses in our litigious society!
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Sadly nothing new , all the airframe OEMs have in recent years become increasingly protective of their intellectual property (IP). They have all become far more aggressive in enforcing what they see as their rights to protect and monetize it ,where third parties are using their data, designs, drawings , manuals and materials to enrich themselves.
In part they would argue it’s to prevent bogus parts , protect their reputation and the safety of the product. But to come after a cottage industry serving a small band of enthusiasts is a little over the top. I suspect they have IP lawyers searching the web for use of their companies name and those of its products.
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Hmm…now it’s almost become a kind of hobby for rights holders. It doesn’t matter which industry, whether it’s about downloading music or films or here, as in this case, about plastic kits and decals. I’ve heard of cases on Ebay where private individuals sold used Levi’s jeans and received an injunction from Levi Strauss & Co.
You have to be an influencer! They really have the jackpot. They present some “great” products on their YouTube channels, get thousands of followers and are then generously sponsored by the companies. Very clever business model. That’s what we should do as model builders.
Then we would get a lot of money. Great support, especially for the decal makers and kit producers among us.Think, they could really need it. Would be great! ????????
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This is nothing more than a flare-up of what happens in our hobby every now and again. The reasons vary but the effect is the same. Look in hobby magazines from the late ’80s and early ’90s and we were facing the same issue then. Companies’ legal/IP departments can be a little more aggressive about it now because the Internet makes it easy to find things, and it’s easy to send a cease-and-desist order to a one-person operation.
And, yes, legally a company is obligated to protect its intellectual property lest trademarks, logos and other indicia get diluted and become generic. And, yes, airlines and aircraft manufacturers were a lot more cooperative when they were run by airplane people instead of JDs and the MBA set. It’s a different world now, I’m afraid. I’ve seen this before and the hobby will survive, even though some of the product will become no-name, or you have to get it through the time-honored “I know a guy” system. Or, now, with the technology we either have or will soon have, you’ll be able to 3D-print whatever you want anyhow, or print your own decal artwork. In 20 years the whole thing will be moot, I think.
Jodie Peeler
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law
Very well said Jodie. ????????
In 20 years I will probably rush to my craft table with my walker and forget what I want to do there. ????????????
Who knows what kind of kits we will have there….
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Good grief! I didn’t think LockMart was building airliners any longer.
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Boeing did this back in the ’90’s. I remember when Hasegawa had to block out the name Boeing on all their products until some litigation was resolved. It all seemed very petty back then as it does now. As stated above, it is free advertising and good product placement for them. Just wanted to throw this in.
Jerry
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Out of interest is there any history of Airbus acting like this or is it just an American thing?
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Could one get around this by selling decals for “generic 144 trijet s-duct widebodies?” One could even put a disclaimer on the bottom that says “any resemblance to products sold by LM or marketed as ‘tristar’ or ‘l-1011’ is purely coincidental. Our products differ in notable respects from the aforementioned articles and can be applied to any airliner kit.”
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David,
If memory serves, the folks in Toulouse have been pretty cooperative when it comes to our hobby.
They seem to recognize the benefit(s) of free advertising and exposure. The US based guys, OTOH,
are all about the Benjamins.dave6376 :
Out of interest is there any history of Airbus acting like this or is it just an American thing?
Alan Aronoff
Where there's a will, there's a relative.One more aspect of this I forgot to mention: enforcement of trademarks and licensing also protects the companies that have sought licenses to produce Lockheed-Martin merchandise, and there are some companies in the modeling hobby that have gotten official licenses to produce Lockheed-Martin products. If you make these companies buy licenses but look the other way when it comes to others…you can get the idea. It does seem petty to go after a one-person operation, I know, but that’s the way it is.
Right now I am having to go through a similar issue on a book I am writing, and I am having to get official clearance to use photographs from certain corporate archives. Am I enjoying it? Not one bit. Has it cost me money? Yes, and it’ll probably cost even more before it’s finished. It’s especially irksome because these are photographs that would otherwise never be seen again, and it’s on a now-obscure subject. But it’s the nature of intellectual property law that this is the way it must be handled. And if I jump through all those hoops to do this the right way, only to see someone use the exact same photos without going through the same (or forking over what I had to), you bet it’s going to tick me off.
Licensing and license fees have made creativity frighteningly expensive, if not unaffordable, for the majority of us. But enthusiasm and passion do not cut much ice in corporate suites, accounting departments, or legal departments, and certainly not when it comes to what is corporate property. We can rail against it all we wish on message boards, but it’s baked into the realm in which we now live, and it’s a cake I don’t see getting un-baked any time soon.
Jodie Peeler
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law
Okay, so if I produce a decal for XYZ Airlines and it happens to fit an existing model of a Lockheed product, but if I don’t put the word “Lockheed” anywhere on it, and I refer you to the myriad online photo sites where you can find all the photos you want to guide you in applying your XYZ Airlines decals, then Lock-Mart has exactly doodlie squat to say about my business. Sorry, but they simply have NO legal leg to stand on. I’m not selling anything Lockheed, and they can feel free to take me to court (there is a zero percent chance they will do so). I’d put them on “auto ignore” and go about my business.
If their business is threatened by people making stuff for toy plastic airplanes whose world wide saturation point is measured in the low hundreds, more power to them. They have bigger problems to deal with, like the F-35 Boondoggle that they can barely get off the ground.
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@ Jennings
Yes, I don’t understand that at all. To return to the first post. It’s actually about decals from UNITED AIRLINES but not about LockMart itself or directly their product. If at all then UNITED would probably have reason to file an injunction – but not LockMart I think. LockMart is only mentioned by name but nothing is produced or sold by them. It’s about airline decals. And this is exactly the point I can’t understand. Maybe that’s because of the American license or copyright law that we Europeans can’t understand. Maybe someone of you can make it short and understandable.
P.S.: One curiosity: The USCSS NOSTROMO from the movie ALIEN is (was) a LockMart CM-88B Bison towing vehicle. With Rolls-Royce engines. Never mentioned in the movie but first in the book “ALIEN: The Blueprints” (Graham J. Langridge, Titan Books 2019). A LockMart product that doesn’t exist (or doesn’t exist yet or ever will). Pure science-fiction. In this case, could LockMart also seek license fees or an injunction for a non-existent product from model manufacturers or 20th Century Fox (Walt Disney Co.)?
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the PRIDEbird :
P.S.: One curiosity: The USCSS NOSTROMO from the movie ALIEN is (was) a LockMart CM-88B Bison towing vehicle. With Rolls-Royce engines. Never mentioned in the movie but first in the book “ALIEN: The Blueprints” (Graham J. Langridge, Titan Books 2019). A LockMart product that doesn’t exist (or doesn’t exist yet or ever will). Pure science-fiction. In this case, could LockMart also seek license fees or an injunction for a non-existent product from model manufacturers or 20th Century Fox (Walt Disney Co.)?No. Lockheed Martin could issue a C&D order to the author (which could be dubious under the doctrine of incidental use in a fictional work) but it would be difficult for Disney/20th Century Fox to be held accountable for what an outside author puts in a derivative work of fiction, inserting information that was not plainly expressed four decades before. I could write a novel and mention in passing that the protagonist is a pilot who flies Boeing 737s with CFM engines, and there’s not much Boeing could do with me, since that’s an incidental mention. OTOH, if I start making allegations that Boeing products or CFM engines are faulty, that’s another kettle of fish, and this discussion has taken enough turns without us getting into defamation law.
Jodie Peeler
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law
“F-35 Boondoggle” Love it. Well put, my sentiments exactly.
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I was wondering if the continued absence of Boeings, MDD aircraft and Tristars from the Airfix 1/144 airliner range was also down to the copyright litigation issue. 727,737, 747 and DC-9 are the staple fare for modelling airliners from the 1960s onward. Maybe Airfix prefer to stick with re-inventing the wheel and popular types like the Spitfire. Revell on the other hand have brought us the 777-300 and 787s so maybe there is some other reason.
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Airfix would probably rather cut new tools for the military kits that are more likely to be good sellers and provide more likely return on investment. Licensing isn’t the issue, given that Airfix has issued new-tool P-51s and other aircraft whose licensing is now handled by Boeing. It’s a safer bet for Airfix every now and then to pull out the old, paid-for airliner tooling and pop out a few thousand kits with whatever decal they’re able to get licensed. I would not attribute to neglect what is more likely the product of pragmatic business decisions. It’s hard for us to appreciate sometimes, but airliners are a niche market, and a manufacturer’s going to make a lot more money off Mustangs and Phantoms than new-tool 727s and first-generation 737s.
Jodie Peeler
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law
This topic is from two years ago. Nevertheless, I recently was able to aquire LTU and Gulf Air decals for a certain long since out of production widebody trijet from a UK vendor. I hope that’s generic enough that most of us can figure out the rest. A Canadian vendor also seems to still offer decals for the aforementioned airliner. PM me if you need further info.
Discovering Clint Groves and his ATP/Airliners America catalog in the late '70s made me realize I wasn't the only hobbyist with an interest in building airliner models. Beginning with Aurora kits and now enjoying the latest offerings from Revell Germany and Zvezda in 1/144 scale, it's been a fun ride.
And, yes, legally a company is obligated to protect its intellectual property lest trademarks, logos and other indicia get diluted and become generic. And, yes, airlines and aircraft manufacturers were a lot more cooperative when they were run by airplane people instead of JDs and the MBA set. It’s a different world now, I’m afraid. I’ve seen this before and the hobby will survive, even though some of the product will become no-name, or you have to get it through the time-honored “I know a guy” system. Or, now, with the technology we either have or will soon have, you’ll be able to 3D-print whatever you want anyhow, or print your own decal artwork. In 20 years the whole thing will be moot, I think.
Jodie Peeler
Jodie is absolutely correct on a number of points. If a company does not charge for the use of their likeness and images…then ANYONE can reproduce their logo’s, trademarks, etc. for any purpose they wish. This could place the falsely identified company in serious legal trouble.
For example….say LockMart did not charge for the use of their logo’s or images. Some unscrupulous operators could stamp “Lockheed Martin” on bogus parts and sell them as “official” support products. If the plane goes down because of the parts with the pirated logos…LockMart could still be neck deep in legal trouble (lack of enforcement of proprietary rights, leading to unauthorized use during fraudulent transactions.)
Having said that, LockMart only has to charge a minimum of $1.00US (I believe) for the right to use their material, to protect their ownership rights. I think they should consider a “sliding scale” for relative worth (model airplanes vs. actual aircraft parts.)
But as Jodie said….in 20 years it may all be moot anyway.
Braniff2
MCI
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