Atomic Systems

Hi All.
I have a 3 year old grandson who is mad about Thomas, & wants to know, why i dont have Thomas on my railway? Help Lads & Lasses, is there any Thomas locos & stock out there,
please, For my sanity he is driving me mad.
Regards
Ian

There was a brief discussion about this a while ago. I think the main issue was the fact that the owners of the copyright will not allow it under any circumstances.

I do rememeber a site of the Thomas & Friends for Railworks in WIP but thats now stopped due the owners HIT for copyrighted etc.

But surely if the locos were freeware and nobody was making a profit from them, I can't see what the problem is.

You are still copying work, freeware or not. Rules still have to be adhered to.

There as a post about this on the Steam forum recently:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2147197

Colin

This has been discussed a number of times over the years. HIT who own the commercial rights to Thomas and friends are very pro-active about protecting their intellectual property and trade marks. Preserved railways have to pay a significant fee to run a Thomas weekend etc.

Trademarks and intellectual property are a minefield - if you turn a blind eye to somebody using or misusing it then you can lose a valuable asset for good. I think aspirin is one of the most notorious cases where the company misused the trademark and it became a generic term that anybody could use.

The same could apply if HIT ignored a freeware model - it could in turn mean that other people could then make payware models and sell them with no payment of fees or royalties to HIT. That could turn into a problem if they every decided to market their own payware or tried to license it to a payware provider.

The reason there is a moderator tag on this post is because I will state now - any posts made that are potentially libellous or defamatory about HIT will result in the posts being deleted and if necessary the topic being locked. HIT have been known to send "cease and desist" letters to website owners where people have made over the top statements about a legitimate business stance regarding trademark and intellectual property.

See also http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 6&t=112647

I've no idea who or what HIT is but the Awdry family have for many years allowed Hornby to produce 00 gauge models of Thomas & co so I would expect them to be accomodating to an appropriate approach to produce computer generated versions

Steve

I'm pretty sure Hornby have been making Thomas models since the mid-80s, long before HIT acquired the rights. It's possible that a long-standing agreement with the Awdrys / Britt Allcroft was transferred over in the sale, but I would imagine the Awdrys now have very little input into who HIT licenses the image to. I have to agree though that a "Thomas" pack or a standalone, NRM Flying Scotsman-style game could work very well with younger budding simmers (or even with us big kids wanting to recreate a preserved railway). It would no doubt sell like hotcakes as a boxed product at Thomas events or in game stores / HMV at Christmas. After all, if Hornby are still selling their Thomas range despite the massive downturn in the model railway market then the sales must surely still be there.

JB

See http://www.hitentertainment.com/corpora ... .aspx?c=uk and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Entertainment

The Awdry family no longer own the rights.

Out of interest, do the Awdry's still own the Railway series books? And also, how come models can be ( or are ) made for trainz and msts but not rw ?
Regards
Edward

Don't know on either question. I do know several sites have been hit with legal letters though "requesting" they remove the models.

It really is just not worth the hassle for Matt to get involved in the arguments hence we don't host any of the files as far as I know.

I made a submission to HIT some time ago which was based on Puffing Billy Railway, A Day Out With Thomas Weekend.
Their answer was NO!

The major obstacle to getting things like this through is that companies like HIT who own lucrative brands are generally fairly conservative with their licensing, such that anything which is not a guaranteed win-win business move will get rejected. While it might be easy for people to talk on internet forums about how great sales would be for a DLC or mini-game, convincing a company like HIT that it would be a good business move and would enhance the brand rather than dilute it would be tougher in reality.

Things like this (or for another example the long delay in getting The Beatles in the iTunes Music Store) may be frustrating for the layman in the street, but the only real option is to lobby the Parliament for more liberal intellectual property laws. The good news for anybody under the age of about ten is that any of the concepts or works created by the Rev W Awdry will enter the public domain at some point... in 2067.