4 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Is that an issue with the models or liveries? I’d have a hard time believing they’ve negotiated rights to every airline livery with the respective airlines anyway. 

Not the rights from the airliners, but from the people who made the models and textures for these aircraft.

Everything AIG distributes they have permission from the textures creators and model makers to only be distrusted via their program.

Edited August 22, 20223 yr by Tuskin38

Just now, Tuskin38 said:

Not the rights from the airliners, but from the people who made the models and textures.

Ha. I’m no legal expert, but it seems a bit questionable for people to be using airline liveries without permission and then claiming copyright control over their use of them. 

Just now, Virtual-Chris said:

Ha. I’m no legal expert, but it seems a bit questionable for people to be using airline liveries without permission and then claiming copyright control over their use of them. 

Copyright was the wrong term I think, just distribution rights to what they made.

1 minute ago, Tuskin38 said:

Copyright was the wrong term I think, just distribution rights to what they made.

Sure, but regardless of the correct term, they are trying to control something that was built with something they took without permission in the first place. It seems rather hypocritical to me. 

1 hour ago, aktorsyl said:

Told you! Happy you got it working 😄

 

Yes, it's great! Downloaded around 40 airlines that visit some main hubs where I like to fly and so far used them with FSHud: works like a charm! Realistic aircraft around me at last! For free! They even look great up close! 🙂

1 hour ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Ha. I’m no legal expert, but it seems a bit questionable for people to be using airline liveries without permission and then claiming copyright control over their use of them. 

Sure, but regardless of the correct term, they are trying to control something that was built with something they took without permission in the first place. It seems rather hypocritical to me. 

Nobody is claiming copyright over the use of the livery or trademarks, merely of the original created work - In this case the textures. Anybody can create a BA or Air France or Delta texture, nobody is claiming that those marks are held copyright by the texture artist, merely their own actual work which is absolutely within the rights of the individual.
This precedent has been used by AVSIM for years and is how the law works. Tom was a trailblazer in standing up for freeware authors and happily good folks like Ray have kept that spirit alive.
Copyright laws are complex and can't simply be explained away by simple statements.

In general terms Fair Use would permit the artistic recreation of a copyrighted mark - In the case of freeware a fair use defence would almost certainly be successful if challenged. Additionally as the textures are created by the artists own work rather than taken directly from the copyright holder, you are allowed to create art whether it be a drawing, painting, digital art or photograph for example of material containing copyright images.
For example if I took a photo of a large Coca Cola billboard in Times Square and someone then stole that image I am perfectly entitled to claim copyright infringement of the photo and it does not get nullified simply because I didn't get permission from Coca Cola to include their trademark.

No hypocrisy, just how the law works. Unless of course you would prefer a flightsim world where we all have to use fictional airlines because nobody is allowed to create real world liveries for AI as well as for PMDG, Fenix, Just Flight, Leonardo aircraft etc etc?
Also that would mean scenery developers would not be able to use for example HSBC logos on jetways, or airline logos and signs at any airport.

Perhaps you could try your theory by taking one of the PMDG 737 livery textures and uploading it as your own and see if they are OK with that and how successful your defence of "well you don't own the copyright to the airline livery and logo so its OK" works out?
 

57 minutes ago, atco said:

Nobody is claiming copyright over the use of the livery or trademarks, merely of the original created work - In this case the textures. Anybody can create a BA or Air France or Delta texture, nobody is claiming that those marks are held copyright by the texture artist, merely their own actual work which is absolutely within the rights of the individual.
This precedent has been used by AVSIM for years and is how the law works. Tom was a trailblazer in standing up for freeware authors and happily good folks like Ray have kept that spirit alive.
Copyright laws are complex and can't simply be explained away by simple statements.

In general terms Fair Use would permit the artistic recreation of a copyrighted mark - In the case of freeware a fair use defence would almost certainly be successful if challenged. Additionally as the textures are created by the artists own work rather than taken directly from the copyright holder, you are allowed to create art whether it be a drawing, painting, digital art or photograph for example of material containing copyright images.
For example if I took a photo of a large Coca Cola billboard in Times Square and someone then stole that image I am perfectly entitled to claim copyright infringement of the photo and it does not get nullified simply because I didn't get permission from Coca Cola to include their trademark.

No hypocrisy, just how the law works. Unless of course you would prefer a flightsim world where we all have to use fictional airlines because nobody is allowed to create real world liveries for AI as well as for PMDG, Fenix, Just Flight, Leonardo aircraft etc etc?
Also that would mean scenery developers would not be able to use for example HSBC logos on jetways, or airline logos and signs at any airport.

Perhaps you could try your theory by taking one of the PMDG 737 livery textures and uploading it as your own and see if they are OK with that and how successful your defence of "well you don't own the copyright to the airline livery and logo so its OK" works out?
 

Like I said, I’m no legal expert and it sounds like you know a lot more than me. It’s an interesting topic though  

 I still find it somewhat hypocritical for an “artist” that models an aircraft without permission from the manufacturer and then puts another companies logo on it, without their consent to be claiming any kinds of rights around it and dictating how that can be distributed.

I know of at least a few companies that guard the likeness of their products (Ferrari, Glock, Lucasfiln/Disney, for example) that would probably disagree with you  

I suspect freeware authors here are getting away with it simply because the airlines and aircraft manufactures can’t be bothered to pursue action  not because it’s ok  if true, it’s a bit rich for them to be complaining about how these works are distributed  

I suspect the reason Asobo doesn’t just offer every aircraft model and every livery in the sim is because they would never get away with what you’re suggesting. They would actually need to properly license them. 

Edited August 22, 20223 yr by Virtual-Chris

You are missing the point completely.
Yes many companies ferociously protect their marks for good reasons. Yet I'm not aware of any company that bans photography or art recreations of those marks.
Just Google search for Ferrari and there are ten of thousands of images of Ferrari cars and their logo, are you going to claim that these are all officially licensed?
Go onto Deviant Art and take a look at all the Disney characters that are on there, or do another Google image search. These images exist in abundance.
Art is Fair Use and long established legal precedent.

The copyright claim is for the created art as a whole - not - for the use of the individual marks. This is the key point. Again if I took a photo that contained trademarked logos in it and you then stole it, sold it and profited from it then you would absolutely be liable for infringement.
Using that same photo, if the company whose logo was pictured sued for infringement I could easily claim a fair use defence, particularly in the event there was no harm or financial loss. Fair use was created exactly to prevent the kind of cases you are seemingly advocating for.

In 2018 I successfully claimed a copyright infringement over the theft of a photo of mine - they even left my watermark visible! - from an aircraft manufacturer even though the aircraft in question was one of their own aircraft!

Freeware authors are not getting away with anything, its established case law.
If it was how you describe how is it that commercial for profit entities like PMDG, Just Flight, Fenix, FlyTampa, Orbx etc use copyrighted logos in their addons?

Asobo don't offer every model and livery because they would never release anything else otherwise. A company will pursue an official license because they want to co-operate and gain information from the best source, and its often beneficial to both parties and almost always involves money changing hands.
The Fenix A320 for instance is marketed as an "Airbus A320", but I don't see an officially licensed by Airbus notice anywhere, surely in your view that is a massive infringement? Same with the Just Flight 146, all the Carenado planes, the Kodiak and every other addon aircraft that doesn't have an official license. If what you are arguing was true no 3rd party could ever create an aircraft without an official license and nobody could ever paint a livery without a license from the airline.

If you want to comment on how you think people are committing copyright infringement it would be wise to first understand how copyright law works, otherwise please stop accusing people of willingly breaking the law and "getting away with it".

Edited August 22, 20223 yr by atco

On 8/21/2022 at 12:40 PM, Nemo said:

and what's a bit more annoying, seeing air liners from Papua, Poland or South Africa at mid-sized regional airports in California.

What?  I thought this was a major benefit of AIG over ST?

27 minutes ago, atco said:

You are missing the point completely.
Yes many companies ferociously protect their marks for good reasons. Yet I'm not aware of any company that bans photography or art recreations of those marks.
Just Google search for Ferrari and there are ten of thousands of images of Ferrari cars and their logo, are you going to claim that these are all officially licensed?
Go onto Deviant Art and take a look at all the Disney characters that are on there, or do another Google image search. These images exist in abundance.
Art is Fair Use and long established legal precedent.

The copyright claim is for the created art as a whole - not - for the use of the individual marks. This is the key point. Again if I took a photo that contained trademarked logos in it and you then stole it, sold it and profited from it then you would absolutely be liable for infringement.
Using that same photo, if the company whose logo was pictured sued for infringement I could easily claim a fair use defence, particularly in the event there was no harm or financial loss. Fair use was created exactly to prevent the kind of cases you are seemingly advocating for.

In 2018 I successfully claimed a copyright infringement over the theft of a photo of mine - they even left my watermark visible! - from an aircraft manufacturer even though the aircraft in question was one of their own aircraft!

Freeware authors are not getting away with anything, its established case law.
If it was how you describe how is it that commercial for profit entities like PMDG, Just Flight, Fenix, FlyTampa, Orbx etc use copyrighted logos in their addons?

Asobo don't offer every model and livery because they would never release anything else otherwise. A company will pursue an official license because they want to co-operate and gain information from the best source, and its often beneficial to both parties and almost always involves money changing hands.
The Fenix A320 for instance is marketed as an "Airbus A320", but I don't see an officially licensed by Airbus notice anywhere, surely in your view that is a massive infringement? Same with the Just Flight 146, all the Carenado planes, the Kodiak and every other addon aircraft that doesn't have an official license. If what you are arguing was true no 3rd party could ever create an aircraft without an official license and nobody could ever paint a livery without a license from the airline.

If you want to comment on how you think people are committing copyright infringement it would be wise to first understand how copyright law works, otherwise please stop accusing people of willingly breaking the law and "getting away with it".

I could be wrong, but I believe that MS licensed all the planes in the sim. And it seems SWS licensed the Kodiak from Daher from what I’ve read as Daher actually has to approve what they release. I would be very surprised if any payware aircraft are not licensed… but I’m not sure. What makes you think that none of these companies have a license?

Anyway, I’m not accusing anyone of infringement, just hypocrisy. 🙂  

I don’t feel that these AIG models are like photographs… unique art. They are replicas of company products. I don’t think you will find a Ferrari in your racing game without Ferraris approval. Or a Glock in your shooting game (Glock has taken a very strict stance - they won’t even let a likeness of their weapons be used in games). 

You're of course entitled to your opinion and what you may feel, but that doesn't mean that its in line with the actual law is.

You also most definitely accused freeware authors of infringement, you said:
"I suspect freeware authors here are getting away with it simply because the airlines and aircraft manufactures can’t be bothered to pursue action  not because it’s ok  if true, it’s a bit rich for them to be complaining about how these works are distributed"
What are you suggesting they are getting away with if not copyright infringement?

Its kind of amusing to me that as you have AIG installed you are probably enjoying many of my repaints in your sim (you said you have Air Canada installed, which is all my work) hundreds of hours of my time provided to you at no cost whatsoever and yet you don't think I should have the right to stand up and protect that work that I have put in. Would you feel differently if you had to pay for it?
I presume that you will be up in arms about the upcoming Just Flight FS traffic:
https://www.justflight.com/in-development/fs-traffic-microsoft-flight-simulator
Over 700 liveries included and I'll bet you any sum of money you want to wager that none of them are licensed from the actual airlines themselves.
To test your position perhaps you should download the addon when its released and then re-upload it all for free or a small charge and see how well Just Flight take it. Because according to the position you are advocating, you could totally do that because they don't own the trademarks of the aircraft manufacturers or airlines, and if they were to defend their IP they would be hypocrites?

I have nothing more to add, clearly this is going nowhere, so to avoid this thread going further off topic, I'll simply wish you a pleasant evening and hope you enjoy the result of the thousands of hours of my time I've devoted to my repaints, models and flightplans over the decades I have been giving back to this community.

Edited August 23, 20223 yr by atco

5 minutes ago, atco said:

You're of course entitled to your opinion and what you may feel, but that doesn't mean that its in line with the actual law is.

You also most definitely accused freeware authors of infringement, you said:
"I suspect freeware authors here are getting away with it simply because the airlines and aircraft manufactures can’t be bothered to pursue action  not because it’s ok  if true, it’s a bit rich for them to be complaining about how these works are distributed"
What are you suggesting they are getting away with if not copyright infringement?

Its kind of amusing to me that as you have AIG installed you are probably enjoying many of my repaints in your sim (you said you have Air Canada installed, which is all my work) hundreds of hours of my time provided to you at no cost whatsoever and yet you don't think I should have the right to stand up and protect that work that I have put in. Would you feel differently if you had to pay for it?
I presume that you will be up in arms about the upcoming Just Flight FS traffic:
https://www.justflight.com/in-development/fs-traffic-microsoft-flight-simulator
Over 700 liveries included and I'll bet you any sum of money you want to wager that none of them are licensed from the actual airlines themselves.
To test your position perhaps you should download the addon when its released and then re-upload it all for free or a small charge and see how well Just Flight take it. Because according to the position you are advocating, you could totally do that because they don't own the trademarks of the aircraft manufacturers or airlines, and if they were to defend their IP they would be hypocrites?

I have nothing more to add, clearly this is going nowhere, so to avoid this thread going further off topic, I'll simply wish you a pleasant evening and hope you enjoy the result of the thousands of hours of my time I've devoted to my repaints, models and flightplans over the decades I have been giving back to this community.

I certainly do appreciate the effort invested. But I still am not sure of the legality. Ultimately I don’t really care that much. I thought it was an interesting topic. It comes up in game forums a lot… car games, shooting games, etc. It’s interesting to know how real world products and brands get into games. 

I mean, maybe you’ve got an agreement with Air Canada and Airbus and Boeing or maybe you don’t need one. I’m still not sure. Anyway, we can definitely move on. 

I had AIG working for me after a bit of initial pain. But couldn't see (and perhaps there was a solution) any GA traffic. Also was getting stutters. In hindsight, it may not have been AIG related but at the time, the idea of an app trawling through all kinds of sites, old and new for aircraft textures didn't sit right with me. So decided to get rid of it. Got Simple Traffic. Apart from some weird aircraft behaviour like low flying jets zooming over airports periodically which seems to have been fixed, it works pretty good. I think its a good interim solution if AIG doesn't work for someone.

4 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

I don’t feel that these AIG models are like photographs… unique art. They are replicas of company products. I don’t think you will find a Ferrari in your racing game without Ferraris approval. Or a Glock in your shooting game (Glock has taken a very strict stance - they won’t even let a likeness of their weapons be used in games). 

You certainly have nothing to apologize for, and you've raised very fair, reasonable questions that a lot of people here are very happy to wave away. As atco said, copyright laws are indeed complex and can't generally be oversimplified or boiled down to absolutes. Along those lines, the legal issue you've raised here deals with a "derivative work" that is based on a previous work (that may have its own creator and copyright). This is a famously complicated and hazy area of intellectual property law, because whether a derivative work can be protected by copyright, and to what extent, depends on its "originality," which is extremely subjective in most cases. It's a spectrum where the only really clear cases are at the extremes, and most things that are derivative works fall somewhere in the middle.

Contrary to what atco said, I think you could certainly make a case that, under US copyright law, airline repaints such as AIG uses are not actual derivative works entitled to independent copyright, because they are mere copies of the original real-world liveries with only as much alteration as needed to put them in the flightsim medium. This is parallel to a one of the most famous cases in copyright, where a manufacturer was making copies of antique coin banks and claimed copyright for his design, but a court found it could not be copyrighted because all the manufacturer had changed from the original, antique design was adaptations for molding it in plastic rather than the metal of the original coin banks.

Do I think that would be a correct argument, that these repaints shouldn't be eligible for copyright? Not necessarily; I'm sure these painters would counter that they made other artistic choices beyond mechanical adaptations, much as e.g. a photographer does in taking a picture of a Coca-Cola ad. But I hope I've shown that this is absolutely not a slam-dunk case and if this ever went to court (obviously, not likely!) it is not obvious which set of arguments would win.

Finally, just to add another layer of grey, you can't copyright a derivative work, even if it's substantially original (i.e. the person added enough new substance for it to be copyright-eligible) if you used the original work unlawfully. That in turn gets into questions of fair use. But the point is that the question of whether these liveries were used appropriately (whether through permission or some other factor like fair use) is 100% relevant to whether the repaint has any copyright protection at all.

Ultimately, I wish we'd see a little more humility and a little less sanctimony from folks here who are sometimes very eager to use copyright as cudgel. I think virtually everyone at Avsim agrees that bona fide copyrights and IP rights should be respected. Beyond that, I think a good majority probably agree that even in the absence of a copyright, a creator's wishes should be respected. But there are sometimes real questions of whether something is actually, you know, copyrighted, regardless of what someone put in their readme.

TLDR: copyright is complicated, so maybe don't jump to accuse people of disrespect for IP rights and content creators just because they're asking questions about what's legal and what's not.

James

Back on the topic of AIG, I've loaded about a dozen major airlines from AIG into the sim, including all the major carriers flying to Vancouver (like China Eastern and Air Canada) and I'm using the default AI real live traffic. Interestingly, I get lots of plane models with liveries but sometimes the livery doesn't match the flight.  For example a China Eastern flight was wearing an Air Canada livery.  The sim must be assigning the wrong model/livery to flights. It's strange, but I'm not going to worry about it. There's enough variety for me and I don't need plane spotting accuracy.