Yup, and and on principal, a manual or any other content that was paid for by taxpayers should belong to said taxpayers for whatever use they wish.

Do you actually believe that or are you just pulling my pisser.

https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/itar.html

Have a read thru that website and come back and tell me that the us taxpayer can do whatever they want with military equipment and manuals. BTW, CG covers not just US equipment and information but a host of countries. BTW, this is my day job dealing with this stuff.

No I am not conflating them, they are very much linked together when it comes to international trade of arms and information about that arms.

If the WW2 controversy is anything to go by, I think it's clear that ED only adheres to whatever laws suit them as long as they think they can get away with it. Being located in Russia, I've got a good feeling they won't have any issues breaking American laws.

This is one of the silliest arguements we had here, and that says a lot.

Is every photographer paying royalties for every plane or cockpit he has photo'd?

Who's arguing?

It's a discussion.

Give it a page or two.

Well, for one thing copyright is a civil violation and ITAR is a criminal one. It's as great a gap as trials for murder and wrongful death.

If you give someone information that is controlled, it's illegal. If you give them a photocopy of a document with ITAR info on it, or a recording with ITAR in it, you're not sued by the MPAA or RIAA.

Copyright protects created works. ITAR covers IP that is rarely art. If I tell someone how it works, even if I come up with every word myself, it's still ITAR.



The Jedi Master

Not quite true. ITAR regulations are not to be joked with.

And it has really nothing to do with what you imply. Sorry, but I had to deal a lot with this. (Until I dropped the hot potato to another unlucky soul.)

Copyright is design ownership and classification is distribution restriction. It's totally a different aspect. For example I might paint an accurate painting of Area 51 so I would own the copyright but the US Government would have control of the distribution of classified materials.

So later if it became declassified and the US G sold a copy at auction it would be a violation of my copyright since it's my picture not theirs. However if I distributed the classified painting it would be a violation of distribution restriction even though it's my design I'm not allowed to distribute classified material.

For a government-made manual it's possible to violate CR/IP ownership, distribution restriction, both, or neither depending on the situation. It's a complete 2x2 matrix of possibilities. They are independent and one is not an extension of the other.

Usually the government is way more concerned about the distribution restriction than any IP rights. I'm not even sure if government works aren't automatically public in terms of IP/CR. But regardless of the IP/CR status they can be controlled.

ITARS and Copyrights are very much linked. I deal with this every single day in my job (Military here).

Actually when it comes to manuals etc, some (though not all) are produced in conjunction with civilian manufacturers and those companies may have copyright on the material. Anyone subject to ITARS is bound by law to make every effort to protect the IP of those companies.

Either way folks the posting of aircraft manuals is probably not legal and yet even companies like ED don't care as long as they can get the info they need. As far as pictures go they may be illegal as well depending on where and when they were taken. For example, where I work, you are not allowed to take cameras past a certain area of the base and to do so and especially to use it is illegal.

1) US manufacturers absolutely pursue copyrights involving their aircraft.
2) Multiple online vendors sell government flight manuals in pdf form.
3) US manufacturers don't appear to be pursuing legal action or getting a fee for these scanned flight manuals.

Given the above, I am going to take a stab and say that aside from security issues, US military technical manuals are pretty much public domain. You can even request copies via FOIA if you can stomach the government fee for doing so.

Gate navigation flight in the L-39/DCS 1.5

What are those graphs running bottom / left corner?
Inflight data recordings, or gaming rig performance tracking ?

Cheers,
Slug

Flight control and engine debug streaming data from a developer version.

So you've seen the US gov't take someone to court and get a judgement resulting in a large fine for violating the copyright on a printed document?
You've also seen LockMart send someone to jail for years for leaking a document to a foreign entity?

Or would you say the reverse?


You want to say "derp these two things are linked", fine whatever, but you're wrong because they're different in very meaningful ways.
A private company sues for copyright infringement. The US gov't does not. It doesn't care if you copy Taylor Swift's song.
A private company has no power over ITAR other than reporting violations to the US gov't. The US gov't then takes up the matter.

Again, it's murder versus wrongful death liability. I know because I deal with this every single day in my job (full-time murderer, hit man, and character assassin).




The Jedi Master

As a sidenote from an interesting discussion above (although a sidenote more in line with main topic of the thread :D) I'd like to remind that Aero Vodochody is still a Czech company I believe, so US laws and regulations re. manuals, whatever they are, do not apply in this particular case.

Don't bother much.

It started with asking reference material, photos of the cockpit of the L-39ZA in this case, which is somehow against copyright laws (how?), then it went way off topic to the discussion of USA laws on military manuals.

With exception (in my case anyway) some of the stuff for the Super Hornet is classified (only Australia gets the exception since it uses it). So while I still think me getting banned a couple months ago was pretty stupid (I'm still trying to figure out how banning me would have stopped Suchoi25 from sending the data, but what do I know?) it goes to show that had I taken the information, I would and could have been in jail, simple as that given US DoD classification policies. Sooo... a lot of the older aircraft would be easy to access but stuff on the F-35, Super Hornet, F-22 isn't and still classified, so no, not everything can be obtained FOIA.

And while on the point of Aero Vodochy, that's very true, but TFC is a US-based company (Wags mainly) so he would be proscuted under US law for any violations of classified material. Eagle Dynamics may not have problems (they're a Russian company) but anything seen as a possible liability to his well being (and can't disagree with that honestly) would be ignored, and not welcomed by him.

But having been in the military for 15 years people get retarded over that stuff, as a matter of fact a female Soldier was going to get punished even though the Battalion chain of command was posting the exact numbers of the battalion I was in, while deployed. The issue was dropped when the chain of command saw it on their own Facebook page (makes you wonder...) and she was quoting from it.

The point is that even when I was doing SME work for the A-10C module I was told specifically not to use classified material, and that wsa back in 2008. So while sometimes ED seems (and is in a way) doing retarded things, they're pretty much doing the right thing avoiding any possible litigation focused on them.

And while you as a player may not give a #%&*$#, most companies do and if that's how they want to do it, then that's how they're going to do it. And hell I'd bounce somebody too if they were inserting classified information into my Strike Fighters 2 version. Boeing so far hasn't contacted me so therefore I'm keeping it that way.