- This is a personal developmental wiki, it may often be in an unstable or experimental state and the lack of meaningful content on a page is often intentional; however, you can participate. Please: 1) create an account, 2) confirm your e-mail, 3) send Deirdre and e-mail telling her who you are and why you are interested. Thanks, --Deirdre(talk • contribs)
Boat plans
Boat designs redirects here. For a general page on the process of boat designing, see boat design.
The primary goal of this section of the site is to catalog boat designs that are in the public domain or under free license. Although other boats are welcome, the website owner's primary interest is wooden sail boats. This is also the type of boats for which the greatest number of public domain designs will likely be found. Where full-sized plans can be found, they will be posted. Where they cannot, study plans/magazine prints will be posted. I will try to identify a correct copyright theory for the plans to be free; however, all materials are used at your own risk and I am not providing legal advice. Furthermore, I'm very aggressive in my interpretations of the law, you may find it prudent to be more conservative. There may also be a few non-free plans on this site, read the licenses with care.
Protection of Plans
There are several ways a boat designer can protect their plans in the United States:
Copyright
Boat plans may be protected under copyright law from duplication of the plans. The reason I emphasize "may" is that boats are "useful articles" and under the copyright act the design is only protected "if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article"[1][2] To the extent boat plans are protected, they are subject to the [rules] (mainly that plans first published before 1923 are in the public domain, plans first published between 1923 and 1978 without notice and registration or between 1923 and 1964 with notice and registration but without renewal are in the public domain. Works first published outside the United States after 1923 may be protected even if they did not have a notice or were not renewed.
Vessel Hull Design Protection Act
The Vessel Hull Design Protection Act (VHDPA) give certain specific protections to hull designs first made public on or after 28 October 1998 and registered within 2 years with the United States Copyright Office. To be eligible the design must be embodied in an actual vessel hull. The design, thus registered, is protected for ten years. A discussion of the act can be found here. Generally, the Act is intended to protect boat designers from having others copy the lines of their boats from photos and brochures or possibly from actually taking down the lines of an actual vessel, protection of the plans is not really the point and is secondary, as the types of designers who use the Act are not generally selling plans to clients but are making them as part of a boat building business. Registration would prevent a builder from building a copy of the boat either from plans obtained in violation of the copyright or from lines taken down from actual models and would add a claim for violation of the Act for cases of breach of contract where a designer licenses the plans for a specific number of vessels.
Contract
Vessel designers may make all sorts of restrictions on a vessel when they sell the plans to a builder or client. Frequently designers restrict the client to a single vessel or require royalties for additional vessels. Contractual restrictions, however, only bind the parties to the contract though the existence of such restrictions may form a basis for damages in a copyright action (i.e. if a non-party makes copyright infringing copies and then builds vessels - or a fourth party recipient of the copies does so, the designer may have a clearer claim for actual damages against the infringer); if' the design if protected by copyright at all.
- ↑ 17 U.S.C. 101 (defining "Pictorial, graphic and sculptural works" as "Such works shall include works of artistic craftsmanship insofar as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned; the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.")
- ↑ "Vessel Hull Design Protection Act of 1997 (H.R. 2696)", Statement of MaryBeth Peters, The Register of Copyrights, before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, Oct. 23, 1997 ("It is a long-held view of the Office that a gap exists in legal protection for the designs of useful articles. Existing bodies of federal intellectual property law do not provide appropriate and practical coverage for such designs, while state law is largely preempted in this area. Consequently, while considerable investment and creativity may go into the creation of innovative designs, they often can be copied with impunity.").
