Message to the airplane model manufacturers;

Thank you for making such excellent models of so many exciting planes and helicopters. They give us much pleasure. However, allow us to bring under your attention that many of us do not like it that we can find so many different versions of e.g. the spitfire while so many exciting planes are not available at all.

May we suggest that you come visit Armorama for a series of suggestions for models that many of us are eagerly waiting for. I would further suggest that you agree with one another which company will develop which model, thus ensuring that you have little competition in the manufacturing of the new model while we, your clients, have a pile of new planes to build.
Thanks a lot

I would support this, but the poll has to be more open. We have a huge following here, but only a small % of modelers are on-line and a smaller % are in here. MOST of us in here build regulary I think. It's the whim, spur of the moment, I get to them in the snow modelers that the indus must attract. Had a lot of conversations on this line durning the IPMS NATS here three weeks ago. Some things are doing very well, some are flops. But why company A releases 15 models of a very high caliber, and could have streached them out over 3-4 years, instead of dumping them on the market is questionable. I thing the industry infighting, while great for us a builders, will hurt the hobby in the long run. I am still waiting on that Wellington in 48 from anyone. And insted of making new molds, if some companies just redid the old molds, KIDS MAY GET A KIT, (after you find a way to terminate every gameboy and gamecube in the world!)

My $.02

Hi all!

I suppose Modelers are never happy! :-)

In the past years, the plastic model kit industry has improved a lot! In both quantity as quality! We never had so many choice! Even obscure planes are produced, prototypes and even what if planes!!! Go back 20 years and there was almost nothing from what we have now!
Sure, there will always be a missing one. But frankly, every modeler has a stash of models he would need 3 lifes to build! I think we should build what is available (a lot, look at short run kits!) an wait for the new kits to come! There will be a day when the model kit industry will die because of producing too many kits that won't sell!
Although there are some models still missing in various scales, I'm happy with what is on offer! What I'm unhappy with is the cost of our hobby! Kits, paint, tools, etc... all that is very expensive! I better should not count all the money I already spend!

Jean-Luc

Drabslab,

I would suggest running this idea past the site owner, Staff Jim, before contacting any vendors or manufacturers using Armorama as a contact. He may not have a problem with it but you should ask him first.

Just a thought,

Shaun

Aren't there a lot of issues now pertaining to royalties and licensing of models?

Apparently the manufacturers of the vehicles are demanding royalites, and are charging licensing fees to the model manufacturers, who in turn either have to fork out the cash and up the prices on it's items or they just decide not to sell it.

This is a post from the FSM forums, for anyone who is interested.

_______________________________________

CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF YOUR HOBBY
By: Tom Cleaver

For the past several years, the scale model hobby has been under an assault that is powerful enough to lead to its complete destruction, though many participants are not aware of the problem.

I first became personally aware of this when I was hired to do a project for Revell-Monogram back in 1999. This involved getting some information on airplanes, so I decided to go to the source - the aircraft manufacturers - and ask for their material. When I called Northrop-Grumman, I was referred to the Legal Department, where a not-so-friendly attorney launched into a long and not-so-friendly discussion of how it was that the hobby industry was stealing the intellectual property of the companies by making unlicensed models of their trademarked products. After a few minutes of this, I decided to bail out of the conversation by claiming ignorance and the fact that I was in no position to influence the policies of Revell-Monogram. The next call was to Boeing, where I was quickly referred to the “licensing administrator,” whose conversation was limited to informing me that the licensing fee for obtaining the information was one and a half percent of anticipated profits from the line of models the project involved. I used the same parachute I had used at Northrop-Grumman.

My next call was to the executive at Revell-Monogram who had hired me, to ask just what in hell was going on. I learned that since at least the mid-1990s, companies like Boeing and Northrop-Grumman have been attempting to impose licensing fees on model companies, for the privilege of making “representations” of their “trademarked intellectual property,” i.e., the airplanes they produced.

Since I make my living by the sale of my intellectual property and have a general understanding of this issue, and most of you have never considered the question of copyright and trademark law, let me explain this situation, and what it means to you and your hobby.

Basically, since the outset of the hobby 50 years ago, the makers of model kits were free to design and construct replicas at will, providing playthings, toys, educational products and model kits to the public. The manufacturers of the original items - where they paid attention to the model industry at all - considered these items to be free advertising. Perhaps the fact that many of their employees (at least it was true in aerospace) also built models and were participants in the hobby meant that there were people in decision-making positions who had a personal stake in the continued existence of the hobby.

About 15 years ago, the corporate legal departments realized that all those car models represented a possible revenue stream, and that none of the makers of car kits was big enough to take on General Motors, Ford, or any of the others in a long-term legal battle over trademark infringement. In fact, the companies had a case, since their designs were their original products, and were identifiable and known to the public as Fords, Chevys, Caddies, etc. Thus, the auto companies decided to demand licensing and royalty payments from those making replicas of their cars and within a few years most makers of car replicas were licensed and paying those royalties.

This was followed by the train hobby, with various railroads demanding licensing for use of their logos and names on the cars, and in the area of race cars where even decal makers were required to obtain licenses to produce decals with company logos as seen on the cars.

In the case of the car model hobby, the production runs of mainstream kits are still sufficiently large that the licensing is affordable to the manufacturer. However, for the resin kit cottage industry, it was the kiss of death - nobody who was going to make 100 kits if the mold held out that long was in a position to meet the demands. Thus, you haven’t seen too many resin car models produced in the past ten years.

And just in case you were wondering, you have paid these licensing fees, since the cost was passed on by the manufacturer, and you haven’t built too many cars lately that are subjects the mainstream wouldn’t produce.

Starting since at least 1996, major aircraft makers have begun to jump on this bandwagon, and here is where the problem gets personal for those of us who frequent sites like Modeling Madness and build airplane models.

Companies like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Sikorsky and others are demanding licensing and royalty payments for military aircraft replicas. Not only that, but several Air Forces are now asking for licensing payments to make decals of their insignias!

The model kit industry argues in response that military equipment, including ships, tanks, aircraft and the like have all been paid for by public funds, i.e. the taxes we pay the U.S. Government. Given that these aircraft makers would certainly not be making these subjects without a government contract and a guarantee of a sale for every piece they make, they are not “proprietary,” particularly since an aviation historian can cite instances where a company designed something in response to a government request for proposals, and then lost the production contract to another company without recompense or where more than one company built the product at government direction without any payments being made to the original company. While the companies who built “Flying Fortresses,” “Liberators,” “Mustangs,” “Hellcats,” etc., may well have had significant input into the choice of name, the name was in the end designated by the government entity purchasing the aircraft, so the names cannot be privately trademarked.

Sounds reasonable to me, but then I’m not some 20-something drone in the back of the law library of the legal department at Boeing, with a student loan debt of $100,000 and a desperate need to gain favorable notice from the employer by economically justifying my existence.

The big model companies are fighting this and holding off the manufacturers by not answering the letters and phone calls, because even they don’t have the resources to make the kind of fight all the way up to the Supreme Court that it would take to legally establish this bit of common sense.

It doesn’t take an MBA to know what the result would be if Jules Bringuer were to pick up his phone some morning and hear a posh Brit accent say, “Mr. Bringuer, this is British Aerospace (owner of the “trademarks” for Hawker, Supermarine, Avro, deHavilland, Gloster, Sopwith, Blackburn, Westland, etc., etc.) and I am very sorry to tell you this, but you owe us $200,000 for all the kits you’ve illegally produced of our trademarked products.” Bye-bye Classic Airframes, MPM, Eduard, Roden and every other company in Eastern Europe.

So, what to do?

Mike Bass, who heads up Stevens International, the North American importer of Trumpeter kits (among others), has this past year taken up this cause with a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress. Mike has recently informed me that he has received a call from his representative, Congressman Robert Andrews, who has stated that he will take up this issue in the new Congress that takes office on January 20, 2005, and will undertake an investigation, and if necessary will offer legislation ending the licensing of these public-domain subjects.

Folks, this isn’t a left/right, liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat issue. It’s our ox that’s being gored by these Corporate Bulls!

You can play an active role in stopping this in its tracks. Of the thousands of daily visitors to Modeling Madness, a majority of them seem to be from the United States. That’s a lot of American modelers whose enjoyment of this hobby is at risk if this attempt by the aircraft manufacturers is successful.

What can you do? You can write Mike’s congressman at this address:

Congressman Robert Andrews
2439 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Trust me, if he gets thousands of letters from modelers in the United States asking him to take action, Action Will Be Taken.

And you can also write your congress-critter and tell them about this problem - let them know your concern for the future of this hobby and the continued good fortune of all those independent entrepreneurs running hobby shops and mail order companies and decal-makers and aftermarket companies and their employees who would be put out of their jobs, and all the points made above in the argument against licensing.

If you don’t know which critter is yours, go to http://www.house.gov/

Type in your Zip+4, and you will get your Congressman’s name and office address and office telephone number. If you’ve got an unlimited domestic long distance phone deal, call the Congressman’s office and talk to one of the staff - they pay attention to people who call. Send the Congressman or woman a letter. Trust me on this, when a Congressman gets thousands of letters in support of a particular issue, they sit up and take notice. When those are thousands of different letters, i.e., not “ditto” letters from some special interest campaign, they take even more notice.

Be sure to cc: Congressman Andrews, so he and his staff will know who else in the House knows. Be sure to call or write your Senators, too.

This one isn’t hard: you’re asking them to defend small business, individual entrepreneurship, and the right of the people of the United States to have the full enjoyment of the property rights they have bought and paid for.

And yes, do tell all your modeling friends who don’t come to Modeling Madness and who aren’t on the internet about this. The more the merrier and the greater the likelihood of success.

Or do you not want new kits, decals, and aftermarket products at prices you can afford for the continuing enjoyment of the hobby that keeps you sane?

_______________________________________


So you see it's not because they don't want to produce them, it's because they cant.

I totally agree...

Just one thought about contacting manufacturers (apart from the smaller guys) in general, they aren't interested unless you can go to them with firm, sensible propositions.This may be something to be done here in the future, the problem is basic user apathy. Any requests for Opinon Polls are usually ignored, participation is normally poor and sadly, ill-informed opinion is of little use to a manufacturer....Jim

I've got to agree with Jimbrae on this completely, as I have tried this before with the bigger manufacturers to no avail...the smaller makers are much more willing to listen to us as modelers as well as consumers of their products, and you just might accomplish what you want to by developing a good, sound game plan, with, like Jimbo just said, a good deal of participation from other modelers with the same interest in mind...and don't forget to be polite in your requests, because being nasty or critical will get you nowhere...
Gunny

I have absolutely no intention of contacting anyone on behalve of any one else.

I raised the subject because I looked at a few recent catalogues (Hasegawa; Tamiya...) to find an overlap in what they offer.

On the other hand I find on Armorama relatively frequent requests for models that do not seem to be on the market e.g. a recent CH-53, or a Chinook,...

I know that making a decent mold for a plactic model is costing a fortune. That is most probably why we find so many variants of the same model in the catalog of a manufacturer.

But this seems contraproductive to me. When every manufacturer offers 3 versions of the same spitfire...

Well, for me, having one on display is sufficient. And when I have one on the shelve from one brand I am not going to buy another one from another manufacturer. And I guess that I am not the only one.

I raise this subject, in the hope that some manufacturers also read Armorame or other discussion grousp, to flag that there are other ways to compete than to make the same model as the competitor with another painting scheme.

There are just so many exciting planes that can still not be found on scale.

And I am convinced that bringing a less common model on the market, in agreement with other manufacturers ( who then stay away from this model but bring under the same conditions another model on the market) would lead to a much larger sale for each individual box than the current situation where every brand has X boxes of the good old spitfire on the market.

And we would have an even more exciting range to choose from.

By the way: I have no bad feelings about the spitfire, its just an example.

As Jean-Luc (TedMamere) said, I was looking for some rare model kits such as H-19 Chickashaw, H-34 Choctaw, B-57 Canberra, B/RB-66 Destroyer, E-2 Hawkeye, P-2 Neptune, A-3 Skywarrior, P-3 Orion... in 1:48 scale aircraft; and M-51 Ontos, V-100 Commando car... in 1:35 scale AFV for my Nam model collection. Some kits are available but in resin or in conversion kit and the price is out of my money.

I have the same question as yours: too much Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, Tiger, Sherman, M-1 Abrams, T-54/55... why? and why not for the others? As you know that making a mold is not cheap, the model manufacturer try to release in the same mold or in the retooled mold many variant kit in order to deaden the mold cost. And the product (the kit) must be sold well in big quantity, the manufacturers have to study the modeling market and the best sellers are Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, Tiger, Sherman, M-1 Abrams, T-54/55... so there are many model manufacturers had made the same kit in hoping that they took the big money in selling the same model - as same as the new Tamiya M1A2 Abrams released recently also at Italeri put on the market the new Abrams with some interior detail parts... The first questions at the model manufacturer before making a new model kit: does it sold well? is it a TOP or a FLOP kit?

There is a different thing between model manufacturers and modellers : money and desire.

So I may never be happy!

Count me in, Strike one for the modelatarian!

~Chip :-)

My friends, I amongst others here at the big A have been building models now for over thirty (WOW) years, and unfortunately us as modelers are still facing this fact...until we get a true modeler as CEO of one of the biggies out there, it's gonna be the same old story, most of the time...every once in a while we do get something different, though...
Gunny

this looks like a self fulfilling profecy to me. These models sell big quantities, no wonder, in many shops its the only thing one can find.




and here the manufacturers seem wrong.

Every manufacturer has plenty of spitfires so the total demand is split amongst all manufacturers.

An agreement between manufacturers could lead to e.g. a CH-53 in scale 1/48 only available from Hasegawa.

Would the complete market for such kit really be smaller than the complete market for a spitfire divided by all the manufacturers?