Since flightprep gets their jollies off shutting down free websites that make no money, and with no intent to, I will not be using them or any of their affiliates products.
Flightprep did not shut down any web site. RunwayFinder chose to shut down instead of paying for the use of property that is owned by someone else.
What Flight Prep has done is to assert their Constitutional rights.
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” These words appear in the US Constitution and are established in other countries. They embody the principle that original works are protected and the creators of those works can profit from them for a period of time.
The current landscape of IP has been evolving at a rapid pace; one can trace this latest evolution to the 1991 Supreme Court of the United State (SCOTUS) case of Feist Publications versus Rural Telecom. In this case, Rural Telecom published a directory of listings that contained information on its subscribers. Feist was a publisher that wished to use the information for a larger area directory. When Rural refused to license the material, Feist published the material anyways. (Feist V Rural Telecom 1991) The key finding from the SCOTUS was:
“Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works.”
Websites that are a business and is it fair to those that have put the money into research and development to have someone else come in and give away their invention?
That is what is being alleged here in this legal assertion by FlightPrep. They took the time and invested the money into something that the founding fathers of this nation said was worth protecting, inventions. Runway Finder is being accused of then taking that hard work of others and giving it away. The analogy is is you own a store and pay to stock it with goods, but I walk in take the items and then stand at your front door handing them out.
I borrowed this from the red board. I think it is a really good analogy to what is happening
I recall a couple of brothers back at the beginning of the last century had an idea they patented. Allot of folks made similar products but in the end it was their idea and their property.
Just because Flightpreps idea is not something you can take around the pattern doesn't mean that they didn't put allot of time and effort into it's development. They should be paid for their efforts. Software, while easily stolen, is still property.
I did read it (well, skimmed it, which may mean I missed to whole point), and it looked to me that what they patented specifically was a way to stabilize and control a flying machine, and they included specific information about how they did it. Had another clever inventor come along and come up with a different way to achieve powered flight - say a helicopter - it seems to me that the Wright brother's patent would not have been infringed. The analogy with FlightPrep would work better, I think, if the Wright brothers had patented the idea of travelling through the air. I admit, though, I have not carefully read either patents I'm discussing here.