Irony: Eugene Roddenberry Might Sue You For Using A Replicator To Create Your Own Star Trek Prop
from the replicate-this dept
An anonymous reader alerts us to some odd, and excessive, legal language coming from Eugene Roddenberry, son of the late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Apparently, the younger Roddenberry now runs Roddenberry.com, which sells all sorts of Star Trek replica props and prop kits. Our anonymous reader notes that he was looking through the various prop kits and downloaded the pdf manual for the Boomerang Hand Phaser Prop Kit and noticed the following text at the end:"The physical reproduction by any means known or yet to be invented (including recasting and/or reverse engineering or 3D scanning/printing) of the Roddenberry.com Boomerang Phaser Kit or any of it's parts is expressly prohibited under U.S. and International copyright and product protection laws."While I believe Rodenberry is overstating the law here, and he'd actually have a pretty difficult time suing in a lot of cases, what's even more amusing is the fact that Star Trek, of course, is the show that introduced the concept of "the replicator," a device that is now only weakly approximated by the same sort of 3D printing the younger Roddenberry now seeks to block. It's too bad he doesn't appear to sell a prop replicator, because it would be even more amusing to see the warning text on that manual...
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Filed Under: 3d printing, eugene rodenberry, intellectual property, star trek
Reader Comments
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The real question...
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Re: The real question...
The whole premise of Star Trek is that anything can be copied and society is great as a result.
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Re: Re: The real question...
Now we're right on the brink of the end of scarcity for anything that is essentially encodable as information. To shrink back from that would be to immeasurably damage the progress of our whole society, but entrenched interests sure fight hard to keep it from happening.
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It's the future
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The two add to exactly zero.
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$129
I figure the profit margin on this kit has got to be enormous. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does create a huge incentive to copy it.
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Re: $129
Whether duplication of 'industrial' parts has any protection under the myriad of "IP" laws, I'll leave to the lawyers.
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Re: $129
Sure, anyone can see why he'd want to, in the very least, overstate the restrictions and, at most, outright lie about the restrictions. The more interesting question is what should be the punishment for mistating the restrictions in such a way? In my mind, the punishment for stating innacurate information about the protections on your products should be roughly equivolent to infringing on those protections.
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Re: Re: $129
One big downside of putting in penalties for excessive copyright claims is that we would never know when a ballgame is over. We all know that it is time to mentally turn off a game when we hear that all descriptions and accounts of the game are covered by copyright, and that would have to go away.
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Warning!
"YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!"
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Re: Warning!
PS: it is also the second rule. And the third, fourth, etc. There's no rule against replicating the rules of Replicator Club.
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go ahead
1966+50 = 2016 by time you catch me, by time you gte me into a court
by time yu wake up and realize that YOUR DADS FICTION is not an invention patentable by anyone due to it NOT REALLY EXISTING
what a fucking idiot
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Re: go ahead
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Oh no, Roddenberry...
I did this because I used a replicator to make a time machine from H.G. Wells' books, went back in time to 1923 (just to be sure) and filed the patent.
Then, I went to the future and lobbied to have all "IP" laws enforced so I'll never lose my patent... ever.
I'm now back in this current time frame and dude, you owe me so much damn money, I now understand why you're threatening to sue.
By the way: you're late with last month's payment. Add $1.5M as a late fee.
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Before you rip him a new one...
ttyl
Farrell
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Re: Before you rip him a new one...
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grammar fail
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An actual replicator could never be designed built or marketed.
Its sole purpose to is infringe on someones copyright/patent/trademark, etc.
The cassette tape, the betamax, Xerox Copying machine, the cd, the replicator.
And in this age of patents, could one be invented and NOT infringe itself on someones copyright?
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Re:
It can avoid infringing on someones copyright by the simple fact that the data files used so far either have a copyleft or some other free license, or are created by the users themselves on a CAD program.
That said, as soon as it gets good enough for the masses, it would not surprise me to see more model sharing sites pop up, and some of them will be shadier than Thingiverse.
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