Federation Commander

I dont know how they get away with it but shapeways shure has alot of interesting things for sale. This one looks like someone needs to have a chat with them.

http://www.shapeways.com/model/340157/f ... Box-search

It's a bit of a grey area. As I understand it, it would indeed be illegal to sell copies of another company's Intellectual Property without their permission... so selling an exact copy of the Constitution-Class, for example, would be illlegal. Using another company's registered trademark, such as "Klingon", to advertise your product without the owning company's position is similarly illegal.

Now, this ship is not an exact copy of Paramount's IP. It's obviously based off it, but unless Paramount have a design patent on specific elements used within the ship that have been copied (unlikely, but then again Apple have been awarded a design patent for a smoothed rectangle...) then the only legal challenge they could make would be based on infringement of the general "look and feel" of their IP. I understand that legal action has been threatened on this basis before, but in each case it has been resolved out of court before a precedent could be set on whether it's a legitimate part of the company's IP.

Short version: I'm not convinced it's illegal, but I wouldn't be so convinced that I'd want to risk it in court!

Well, one theory of copyright is that derivatives are contingent on permission of the underlying copyight. If you wanted to do a Zabadu battleship, nobody can stop you, but if you claim something is Federation and it is obviously derivative of the design from Trek, you're walking into a minefield in clown shoes.

DNX?

At 1:5000 they are too big to go with anything anyway.

Too small, surely?

Yes, yes. Sorry, that's what I meant.