From a good car friend of mine who has a unique fiberglass car that his Dad created in the '50s. He's done a phenomenal job of restoring the car, and given his relationship with it, not only does everything about the car, but everything about what went into it.
He wrote:
I
was casually looking around EBay this morning, searching for a
replacement battery for a scooter I need to sell. On a whim, I typed
"Venus Fiberglass Car" in the search box. I scrolled down and ran across
this "auction". Apparently, this company (or guys) copy articles from
Wikipedia and then publish paperback versions, and they did so on the
Venus…I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
"High
Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Venus Automobile is a
one-piece fiberglass-bodied custom car produced in the early to
mid-1950s in the USA. The prototype was mounted on a 1949 Ford chassis,
and powered by a Ford flathead V8 motor with high-performance heads and
intake manifold. The car's designer, Kenneth McLoad, was granted a US
Design Patent, number 177,499 in April 1956. The Venus also appeared on
the cover of the May 1953 issue of Motor Trend Magazine. Less than a 10
of these car bodies were ever produced, and only two are currently known
to be in existence (in Texas)."
What's
puzzling is that the item description shows 146 pages. There's no way
the Venus article in Wiki (which I wrote years ago) can span 146 pages.
Interesting.
Not
sure I'll buy this thing since I pretty much know the story of the
Venus, but might still be interesting to see what's in it. Just goes to
show that nothing on the web is sacred, and forget about any copyrights.
I guess any publicity is good publicity, though they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel!
P
PS: No need to respond; this is just an FYI.
And here is my response:
I am thinking about this. On one side of me,
it's obvious that this Cut N Paste Character is trying to make a living
by collecting free articles, printing them (I guess) and selling them to
people who (I guess) don't have the capacity to look online for this
information (and presumably can't print it out on paper for themselves).
That you wrote the Wiki for it is great, I mean I've never written
anything on Wikipedia since I never felt like I was a definitive source
on much of anything. The Venus. You. Yes.
But the larger issue is copyright protection or more largely,
intellectual property protection. Now we all know the Asians are turning
out a remarkably similar cellphone to the Iphone, and that's just a
simple for instance. There are probably billions more. And as far as
written protection, well the schools have gotten so used to it, that
teachers pretty much state (and check on) that essays and papers aren't
simply taken from one of the top Google results. What actually DOES pass
for original thought, or for that matter original action?
I can be considered guilty of this myself. I mean, ok, the
Allied. Fact is, Bill Burke simply poured plaster of paris all over Bob
Petersen's little Italian sports coupe in order to make a copy he could
take to Bonneville and not ruin his boss' car. I'm sure getting the
fiberglass exactly like the Cisitalia, there might have been compromises
(I've only ever seen one of them in NYC and honestly it might not be
exact but it's pretty close). And while Jud bought this one (nothing has
his name on it, and there's no record of a sale, I just traced the
ownership back), and I'd like to restore it to what his vision was,
there's a little part of me that wishes I had ANOTHER Allied body to
play with. One that I could put on a bit more modern chassis with a bit
more modern components. And honestly that could be done by using this
body as a mold to make another body from. In fact some folks have told
me that I'd be better off recreating the body for this chassis than
trying to fill in all of those crazings and cracks. And just like using a
scanner to copy the Venus body to make a plastic model (that
accidentally got thrown away), that's right there on the edge of
intellectual property limits.
However, and I think you'll agree, there's some sort of huge
effort that's going to be required to copy the Venus or the Allied. I
mean, it might take a lot of money, and we know it'd take a lot of time.
Shouldn't that account for something? And if you did make that model,
or I did drop a late model 302 in the front of an Allied body with
Brembo brakes and a nice six speed gearbox, rack and pinion, coil over
struts, etc, etc, well we know that it wouldn't be cheap or easy. I have
to think I might get the advantage of low wages if I did this in China,
but I'm not sure really if it would be anymore "right" if I were in
Beijing or Baytown.
But I'm reminded of something I read a few years back on Ben
Franklin. I'm an enormous fan of Ben. Yale Press has produced 48 volumes
of all of the known letters he wrote and received (and it's really only
a fraction of what once existed). He was an amazing guy by almost
anyone's standards in a lot of different areas. One of the things he's
best known for is Poor Richard's Almanac, and the main reason's that
he's known for that were all of the pithy sayings found there. The fact
is, he didn't actually make up those sayings. He simply copied or
printed sayings he'd heard, or read someplace else. Yea, intellectual
theft plain and simple (some of these things were actually found in
other almanacs that were currently in print!). But he printed them, and
he made them famous. My guess would be that, if Ben were alive today,
and in a similar sort of publishing business, he'd be kiting stuff
wherever he could find it, and just hoping no one tracked it down (which
perhaps is where we've really gotten smarter in the past 200 years).
Truth is, I'd bet Bill figured since no one had ever actually seen a
Cisi at B-ville, let alone very many Italians, no one would care whether
he'd copy it and got a speed record. And that clown hawking Wiki
articles probably never even knew you existed, let alone might randomly
type those words into an Ebay search.
Finally, I'm a fan of the Beatles. You probably liked them
too. With all of the charades these performers go through with the RIAA
and Napster and music ripoffs, well, it's a wonder anyone ever makes any
money in the music business. However, there's two songs that the Fab
Four produced (after they split up), you might know. One of them is
George Harrison's My Sweet Lord and the other is John Lennon's So This
Is Christmas. In the case of the former, the '50s group (I can't
remember their names which is somehow important I think), sued him for
simply copying the music and sticking new lyrics on it (ok, so I'm not
crazy about George's Hinduism, but whatever). He MADE that song an
enormous success, a success it would never ever have been had he not
simply copied the tune. He lost the suit and paid an unspecified amount
in damages. In the latter, John simply copied an old English ballad
about a horse which was called Stewball. I'll spare you the dreary
lyrics, but frankly every Christmas I hear John's version (and while I
might not be quite as much of a pacifist as he and Yoko were), I do love
the song. He wasn't sued (the tune was too old and the composer was
long dead), so he didn't have to ever pay for his theft. Frankly, I
wouldn't want to hear about Stewball anyway so I think he improved it.
There's a ton of other examples (and even a long list of hymns!), where
about the only maxim is "don't get caught".
And in the end, isn't that sort of what laws really mean?
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