Copyrights and other legal stuff

[Guest guyjr]

Hi all... I've been perusing this group trying to get a feel for the panel / gauge / aircraft design community, as I'm thinking of developing a full featured panel based on the new Flightmax Entegra from Avidyne. I've been looking for documentation on this new avionics suite, and have been pretty unsuccessful so far. I'm thinking of calling up Avidyne to see what kind of documentation they have available, and to see if they'd have any problem with me creating a panel based on the Entegra.Do most of the "pro" design companies like PSS, Flight 1, etc, get some sort of permission from the companies whose products they model, or do they even need to? I'm not sure if I'd go the payware route for this project, it would really depend on finding someone to do a fully featured aircraft for it as well (such as the Cirrus SR-22). I imagine a freeware product shouldn't really be much cause for concern for companies like Avidyne or Boeing, but I imagine they might take more notice if someone were trying to profit from modeling their product.Also, I've already downloaded the file uploaded to AVSim by Harald Scheidl that includes some bitmaps and other files that could be used to create this panel. I don't know if I'll be using any of those however.Thanks for your help!