It’s rare but good news when a blatant rip-off is exposed in ANY field; here, a “modeler” seems to have definitely “outed” as a pirater of another person’s hard work.
In the end, I guess it will be up to a potential buyer to decide whether or not to patronize this seller, or the integrity of the claimant’s charges, but it’s at least good to know of the controversy behind this particular armor piece. If nothing else, it’s a good look into the ups and downs of so-called “derivatives” modeling; several posts in the last few years have been put up with questions about what constitutes an “original” or a “derivative”.
Full disclosure: I don’t know either of these guys.
That forum has been a nest bed of controversy as of late. While 1/72 scale armor is my main modeling genre, I tend to only lurk there because of the many issue that arise. You’d think that in a, relatively speaking, very small subset of armor modeling that the members would get along better than the larger 1/35 scale community.
Gee friggin’ whiz… if you’re going to steal someone else’s work at least try to cover it up at least a little. This is the equal of copying your school paper straight out of the encyclopedia word for word.
I got the impression though Cpl Overby’s Motor Pool based his hull off the Dragon kit, I have no idea what are the legal ramifications of that though.
Most garage resin casters copy parts of plastic kits. He had made several modifications to the Dragon hull, then fully assembled the suspension with track to cast them as a single piece whereas the Dragon kit has the traditional individual road wheels and one piece tracks. His distinct errors in the reworked Dragon hull are part of the evidence he provides.
Now if he just made a resin copy of the complete Dragon kit and sold as his own, that would be piracy, but he took the Dragon kit, modified it into another entirely different version and then simplified the construction.
What the second person did was just copy his resin kit with minor changes like scraping off molded on tools.
Well it’s not like there is anybody going to jail at this point. If anybody goes to jail anywhere in teh world for this sort of thing, Just more of an online “outing”.
I agree that it’s a lot of huffing and puffing there, but I don;t think it’s a “waste of time”. As the one guy said it there, it does matter to the guy who puts hundreds of hours into creating something definitively “derivative” as the creator of the original mold did, and who is relying on income from that effort as part of their livelihood, but then gets ripped off by a blatant counterfeiter. You gotta admit—it was pretty blatant?! [:|]
This thread interested me because we professional musicians have been dealing with people ripping us off for years by creating burned CDs or illegally downloading from “torrents” sites and stealing our music. We’ve ALL collectively noticed a drop in income and when you grouse about the high cost of concert tickets these days, look in the mirror if you’ve ever illegally copied or downloaded some media without paying for it. The sad irony of it is that this has almost been seen as “perfectly normal” in so much of society; when I read this thread, I wondered “Hmm, I wonder if some of the guys condemning the pirater ever got “free” music from the internet too” while condemning a “thief” at the same time?
I know for sure though that this kind of stuff is no limited to just this model. That’s really sad, but it’s a statement about human nature. Or, at least, SOME human nature? [whstl]
Maybe he altered the Dragon kit enough to avoid legal issues or had their permission? In either case, pretty low blow by the other guy. Especially, as Rob said, in such a tight community.
Has the makings of a nice plot for a Sue Grafton novel.
I believe that the original crafter did alter the Dragon kit, and admitted that–he seems to have produced a “legal derivative”. The other guy just rather blatantly stole his stuff and copied it without much of an effort to either improve or alter it. That seems to be the “technical” difference and proof.
To the man who created the original, this is his livelihood and his only source of income. The second man copied his work and sold it as his own. If enough people do this, then the original caster will have to leave the business and then that’s one less supplier of unique model kits.
“The other guy just rather blatantly stole his stuff and copied it without much of an effort to either improve or alter it”
This brings up an interesting legal issue that I know little about… For the sake of discussion let’s say someone made a direct resin copy of a Tamiya kit and then somebody else made a pirated copy of the first resin kit… would Tamiya sue them both? Kinda like that Napster mess, but with models?
I also found it a bit amusing that most of the original modeler’s clues that he was pointing out were errors in his molds. Not that I could do better but that drilled out area under the turret was more than enough proof of piracy.
You sure? I would have thought Academy would have paid some form of licencing fee to Tamiya to use their molds for the kits. It may have been that Tamiya was only willing to licence off it’s older and less popular molds.
They made some very minor alterations to some kits, like the arrangement of some parts on the sprues (Pz.IV), or in the case of the Bradley kits, the orientation of the track pads moulded on the track shoes was reversed. Apparently this was sufficient to say that they weren’t exact copies.
As for the thread over on the “other” forum, it has degraded from an excellent, detail oriented forum to a continuous urinary every thread. What a useless pile of bovine scatology.
As for the piracy issue, I totally agree with Karl. The shame is this is our society today, there is no honor or trust, just dead presidents!
Later 1980s Academy kits were slightly “modified” and often updated to more current versions as opposed to being direct copies, but many of the earlier Academy kits were direct copies of Tamiya kits. Other than the precise fit of a Tamiya kit vs. the often misaligned fit of the Academy kit, you could swap instructions and build the kits with no problems. Even the decals were just a fuzzy duplicate of Tamiya ones.
As for popular or older, Academy was doing this with “hot” Tamiya kits during Desert Shield/Desert Storm like the Abrams, M2/3 Bradley and M60A1/A3. Even Academy’s HMMWV was copied from the Italeri versions (Tamiya issued a licensed Italeri HMMWV w/Bushmaster).
Does anyone remember the old Korean “Idea” brand kits from the mid-late 80’s?
They were direct copies of a number of “brand name” kits (Hasegawa, Tamiya, Italeri etc) Most of these kits looked like they took (bad) castings of the original sprues and duplicated the box artwork, but replaced the brand name logos with their own and substituted Korean text for the box-side descriptions.
Trumpeter began the same way in 1999-2000. The first kit I bought of theirs was an M60A1 that was a very poor copy of a combination of the Tamiya and Academy kits. The upper hull looked like the Tamiya hull was copied with a wax casting. The copied instructions pointed out Tamiya kit parts placement for items Trumpeter molded in place.
Both companies have gone onto better methods of kit creation.