I was cleaning out some old files and found this hierarchy of characteristics that I once sent to my lawyer when I felt someone had copied a boat of mine. They never used it as a strongly worded letter caused the sleazebags to back off. In order of increasingly finer detail: 1. Does it look like a copy to the trained eye? 2. Does it look like a copy to the untrained eye? 3. Does it have the same primary dimensions at a specific displacement (LOA, LWL, Beam, Waterline Beam, draft +/- 2%)? 4. Does it have the same Prismatic coefficient +/- 1%? 5. Block coefficient +/- 1%? 6.Longitudinal center of buoyancy +/- 1%? 7. Longitudinal center of flotation +/- 1%? 8. Angles of entry and exit +/- 1%? 9. Are the sums of greatest positive and negative deviations at amidships and quarter sections less than 12.5mm. The tolerances cover building errors. No doubt some people will disagree but I think this would convince any judge that the builder copied the boat. Someone mentioned putting the suspect boat in the original boat's mold but this won't work well due to the accumulations of shrinkages and distortions from plug to boats. Cheers John Winters *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
Is there legal protection from boat copying? Possibly I missed the answer to that in one of the mega-posts on this subject, but I don't recall seeing the answer. Steve Brown -----Original Message----- ........ No doubt some people will disagree but I think this would convince any judge that the builder copied the boat........ Cheers John Winters *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
The Vessel Hull Design Protection Act, Title 17, Chapter 13 off the United States Code: http://www.copyright.gov/vessels/ On Aug 18, 2004, at 9:07 AM, Steve Brown wrote: > Is there legal protection from boat copying? Nick Schade Guillemot Kayaks 824 Thompson St Glastonbury, CT 06033 USA Ph/Fx: (860) 659-8847 http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
Nick Schade wrote: > The Vessel Hull Design Protection Act, Title 17, Chapter 13 off the > United States Code: http://www.copyright.gov/vessels/ There is a 2003 report which is worth reading. http://www.copyright.gov/reports/vhdpa-report.pdf There are some interesting things in the report. (I'm quoting here, feel free to read the whole report.) Design protection for vessel hulls is for a period of ten years and is available only for original designs that are embodied in an actual vessel hull: no protection is available for designs that exist only in models, drawings, or representations. A design that is embodied in a vessel hull "that was made public by the designer or owner in the United States or a foreign country more than two years before the date of application for registration" of the design is not eligible. Protected designs that are made public must bear a proper design notice. Unlike notice of copyright, which is permissive, notice on a vessel hull design is mandatory. The evidence to date that the VHDPA has been effective in suppressing infringements of protected vessel hull designs is scant and anecdotal. There appears to be only one lawsuit which has been brought under the VHDPA...There may have been private settlements of disputes. Several of the parties submitting comments ... assert that the VHDPA has encouraged them to create new designs for vessel hulls. J. J. Marie, President of Zodiac of North America, Inc., states that "the existence of this legislation clearly pushes our engineers and designers to create innovative and different products...Were it not the VHDPA, the incentive for innovation would clearly be diminished." Applicants may choose to submit drawings, photographs, or other pictorial depictions of the design...The regulations do not require engineering drawings or depictions that contain dimensions, and the application form asks for nothing more than a brief description of the salient features of the design. In response to the February 13, 2003, Federal Register notice, all of the written comments received from industry representatives included statements opposing the Copyright Office's practice of posting registered boat hull designs on the Internet for public access. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
| PT: ...Showing that scaling has occurred is not of itself enough to | identify a copy. Imagine scaling the cross sections of a hull, down | 20%, and the length up 20%. It strains the usual idea of "copy" to | accept that such a different shape is a copy. | | SB: Peter, I think you're really straining ethics with all this | legalese. If you're scaling someone else's original work, even if | you're taking one dimension up 20% and another down 20%, it's still | their original work. ...| | Could you scale someone else's design like that, pass it off as your | own work, and still sleep at night? Are all these arguments an effort | to sleep at night with the Nadgee in your boat shed? PT: With this example, I was moving away from the Nadgee situation, and speaking more generally, and of course, with the 20%, exaggerating to make the point. I agree with the sentiment that scaling up or down or both, owes a debt to the original design. Regards the Nadgee, I am comfortable with its origins, almost. The one retrospective wish is that the original references to the Max had been done clearly with Mariner OK. Subsequent events, such as the design moving away from the Mariner blowups, and opportunities to take the issue up, but foregone, make me comfortable with the end result. My present wish is that repeating this short summary does not cause the Cantankerous Boat Designers Club of North America to need treatment for high blood pressure again. SB; I'm the proud owner of a Guillemot that has been scaled up in length | 6%--from 17' to 18'. It's still Nick Schade's design. All the good | aspects of the design are his. Any unintended flaws in that scaling | are mine. PT: I'm OK with that. Where it gets tricky is if you had introduced deliberate changes away from the direct scaling, from your own preferences and aims for the boat. How much of the new work is required before the original boat designer says, like Rob Bryan and the Chupacabras, "Don't worry about attributing that boat to me, it's now new and different". I don't think there can be a definitive answer to this, detecting the elements from the original design, or noticing the new aspects, is in the eye of the beholder. (Stay down there rolling John, this can't be put into a formula). SB:| Ethically, the Nadgee is a bold-faced copy of the Max. Using another's | efforts for your own commercial gain is wrong. If one person copied | the Max for personal use, it's really not hurting Mariner. If that | same person is selling a closely copied kayak for commercial gain...how | is that okay? PT; There is quite a bit in these comments. I don't agree that the Nadgee is such a copy, relying on what I know from Dave at this end. The proposition that using another's efforts for commercial gain is wrong, leads to a divide in values. Some may say that is progress, enterprise, others that it is a ripoff. I hope I have been careful with whatever I have put in posts in this thread not to be advocating using a design without permission or attribution. But if it is done, without any illegality, isn't that open market competition? I think you are right to point to a difference between copying a design for commercial purposes and for private purposes. In the commercial context, designers have to expect that if they expose their designs for sale, they have whatever legal protection is available, and nothing more, don't they? SB: Generally, all kayaks are inspired (positively or negatively) by a | kayak that has come before them. How much do we pay in royalties to | the Inuit and Aleut for their centuries of design iterations? PT: Nothing. But full respect and credit to all earlier makers and designers. And this, I don't like the idea of stopping development at this point. If somebody wants to take an idea and change it, experiment with more or less the same shape, fit it out differently, see how the hull shape goes with a finer bow, or more rocker, or broader angle of entry etc, why the hell not? | Can we put this to bed? Happily. Cheers, PT *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
So does this boil down to: Do you think it's a copy? Is it the same size? And is it the same shape? And do the parameters chosen to define size and shape (no matter how sophisticated, who thought them up, when they were thought up, where they were thought up) amount to any more than increasing detail, and if so where do you stop!!!! How many commercial kayaks share similar design parameters? Is there more to a kayak than the hullform? (clearly, IMHO) Are the supposedly objective measures of quantitative engineering design the only way of looking at this? - Every kayak I have ever paddled had a qualitative feel, or signature if you like, characteristic of that boat. For example, knordkapp HM, HS, and Jubilee I'd guess would all differ on some or all of JW's copycat criteria below, but paddle them and they are all distinctly knordkapps, ditto primary dimensions of GRP and poly p&H capella's differ but they both have a strong capella feel when you paddle them. All of them different and identifiable. The mariner/nadgee debate is interesting because I don't know either boat though. The hull shapes in the pictures sure look simmilar, but so do a lot of boats. The simmilarity in this case is perhaps very marked because they are both quite unusual. But then again the decks don't look very similar, and unless the cockpits are really odd sizes the beam looks somewhat different too. From the pictures I have absolutely no idea about the dimensions. Without sitting in both of them and paddling them I really wouldn't know, and no one here seems to have done that. Is one person's sleazebag tactics another person's legitimate design methodology? There are after all a number of ways to skin a cat, as it were, and a long history of boats evolving from previous designs no matter who drew them. But really does it matter? I think this needs a value judgement, not just a quantitative measurement. If I was going to buy into a mariner, or guillemot design or John Winter's design I would want to buy into the boat and the experience of the designer and quality of design produced (which could be copied granted), but also the authenticity of the design - a copy no matter how close a facsimile would still be a copy. Who wants a fake Rolex? Cheers Colin http://www.kayakscotland.com/ ----Original Message----- From: owner-paddlewise_at_paddlewise.net [mailto:owner-paddlewise_at_paddlewise.net] On Behalf Of John Winters I was cleaning out some old files and found this hierarchy of characteristics that I once sent to my lawyer when I felt someone had copied a boat of mine. They never used it as a strongly worded letter caused the sleazebags to back off. In order of increasingly finer detail: 1. Does it look like a copy to the trained eye? 2. Does it look like a copy to the untrained eye? 3. Does it have the same primary dimensions at a specific displacement (LOA, LWL, Beam, Waterline Beam, draft +/- 2%)? 4. Does it have the same Prismatic coefficient +/- 1%? 5. Block coefficient +/- 1%? 6.Longitudinal center of buoyancy +/- 1%? 7. Longitudinal center of flotation +/- 1%? 8. Angles of entry and exit +/- 1%? 9. Are the sums of greatest positive and negative deviations at amidships and quarter sections less than 12.5mm. The tolerances cover building errors. No doubt some people will disagree but I think this would convince any judge that the builder copied the boat. Someone mentioned putting the suspect boat in the original boat's mold but this won't work well due to the accumulations of shrinkages and distortions from plug to boats. Cheers John Winters *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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