[FPSPACE] Copyright infringement

[David Woods]

Folks,

Mark is right about the problems with copyright infringement.  An 
example for me is the most recent issue of the JBIS - Journal of the 
British Interplanetary Society.  It contains an article "A Multi-Purpose 
Astronaut Shower For Long-Duration Microgravity Missions" by Marco C. 
Bernasconi, Meindert Versteeg, and Roland Zenger.  On page-174 is a line 
drawing cutaway of the midsection of Salyut-6 showing the onboard shower 
arrangement.  It was one that I did that was part of a series of 
illustrations showing cutaways into Salyut-6 from the nose section to 
the aft engine compartment.  When they were originally published these 
illustrations clearly had my copyright notice on them: "(c) D.R.Woods 
1983".  Dr. B.J.Bluth, under a Grumman funded study took it and a whole 
series of others, cut off the copyright notices and published them in 
"Soviet Space Stations as Analogs  NASA CR-1809020".  When I complained 
to the NASA legal department they said that it was not their problem 
because it was a Grumman funded project even though it was a NASA 
publication.  I never heard back from Grumman or Bluth.  So I calculated 
all of the hours of research and preparation time that I had put into 
them, found the local billing rate for technical illustration 
preparations, came up with a Really, Really Big dollar value, and 
deducted all of that on my income taxes as a one time donation to the 
federal government ...... and it was accepted.  The guys publishing this 
most recent article were unaware that they were perpetuating copyright 
infringement originally done by NASA and Bluth.  It just goes to show 
that the original damage can theoretically go on for ever.

Dave

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [FPSPACE] Another Boeing copyright infringement
Date: 	Fri, 16 May 2008 07:53:37 +0200
From: 	Mark Wade <astronautix at gmail.com>
To: 	fpspace at friends-partners.org



I have to put up with this constantly - uncredited use of my drawings
in scientific papers, government and industry briefings, and magazines
(including Aviation Week, although after my last complaint they did
credit me in a recent issue). Most spectacularly, one author published
an entire book that consisted almost entirely of drawings and data
from my site - credited, but without my permission and contrary to my
conditions of use.

Every attempt to do anything leads nowhere... and it's never worth the
cost of legal action. Moral: if you put something up on the Internet,
you have to expect it's going to be used without your permission. The
main thing is to get the thing properly credited, which in this case
they refuse to do.

But then Boeing was long ago taken over by lawyers and corporate types...

-- 
Mark Wade
Encyclopedia Astronautica
http://www.astronautix.com/
astronautix at gmail.com
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