boatgeek
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I do question any company that gets most of its customer feedback from FB at this point. My mother-in-law is active on FB--and she's 70. Their market is on Insta and Twitter, and specialized forums like this one.
So Facebook is for old folks? If they get their customer feedback from Instagram or Twitter their going to leave out a lot of the same people who are not using Facebook either. The same goes for Tumblr and the rest. The right place to gather feedback, to distribute information, and other such activities is their own web site. Anything else is copping out and not doing the job.
It's worth asking where the people who spend the money are. For scouts, school groups, etc., the people making the buying decisions are old folks like me. Granted, that leads to issues of generational replacement of your customers, but that's a waaaay bigger conversation than this thread.
I'm just spouting off a bit; please forgive me.
It makes perfect sense to me that movie franchise and similar stuff would come with licensing fees that may get pretty heavy; that's a solely commercial endeavor from the word "go", it's all about profiting from the images, and there's no reason that the IP owner shouldn't get his/her cut. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that when IP is created either by the government or under government contract that, at least for some kinds of IP in some instances, it is automatically considered to be in the public domain.
It seems to me that when a vehicle is designed under government contract that it's exterior shape and markings should fall in that latter group, i.e. public domain. And if legally it does not, the contractor that owns the IP, unlike a movie studio, is really not in it to make money from the images, so any licencing fee should be minimal.
"Should be", but I guess it isn't. <Grumble grumble>
On all of the government jobs I work on, the government retains copyright. I don't think they even need to pay royalties to use the design again. That said, boat design has different traditions and somewhat fewer lawyers than aerospace, particularly once the military-industrial complex is involved. I agree on movie/entertainment royalties, though.