LBSC's Designs

Hello,

Who presently owns the rights to LBSC's designs?
I presently draft for Allen Models and Banning Locomotive works doing CAD work, but as a side project I wanted to do some preservation work of sorts- specifically on the designs of Curly Lawrence.

There are plenty that exist many times over (Tich) and I seriously don't foresee becoming lost, but there are plenty of them which I am sure have not seen the light of day in decades. What I would like to do is draw them in CAD and some how ensure that his designs live on for model engineers to enjoy for years to come- rather than just remaining stuffed in a basement somewhere in a stack of old magazines.

I'm not looking to earn a cent off of this, I've come to admire LBSC greatly, I think that it would be safe to say that he is the father of live steam as we know it today. I'd hate to see the legacy of designs he created fade into obscurity.

Here's a sample of my work, the Allen Models Fitchburg Northern.

Sounds like a very honourable project.

I don't think you will have any problems unless you decide to sell copies of your CAD drawings. Then you probably will be breaking copyright, certainly in the UK.

There are several companies in the UK that sell LBSC drawings e.g. Reeves and GLR Kennions. They would probably claim that they hold the copyright to those drawings. I presume that Model Engineer magazine still hold the copyright to the majority of the LBSC designs as they were published in either Model Engineer or English Mechanics.

There is no danger of the 2½" gauge designs dissapearing as the National 2½" Gauge Association was formed to make sure that all the 2½" gauge designs, not just those by LBSC, are preserved for the future.

One of my 'to do list' items is also to produce 3D CAD drawings for all the 2½" designs, mainly to find and correct all the errors in the drawings and improve the valve gears. I've made a start but there is a long way to go!

Good luck to you on your project.

John

Hello Dean,

This is a bit of a tough call.

Our copyright in the designs as published in the magazines expires after 25 years, we retain the right to republish, and any republished version has another 25 years of copyright.

The original author’s (in this case LBSC) copyright is still valid - I have no idea who inherited LBSC’s rights - but they will own his copyright for 60 years after his death.

The plans as sold are also copyright, I have no idea how long it lasts, only that the ones we owned have were sold to Traplet, who have now sold them on again.

Various companies have the rights to various plans as well.

Strictly speaking, you should have the permission of the copyright holder to redraw/modify drawings for other than private purposes.

It’s not really any different, legally, from the rights the estate of JRR Tolkien, Ian Fleming or AA Milne have to the characters in their books.

I can’t really offer any specific advice on how you should proceed, except that if you can identify who owns the copyright to any design, you should seek their permission.

That said, some of the designs are copied or adapted and shared (the 2 ½” gauge designs, for example) and I am not aware of any action being taken, but I am sure that anyone who has rights to sell plans (and they will have paid for those rights) may well wish to defend them

I see you have posted this question on the forum as well, so I will copy this there.

Regards,

Neil

Dean you have a private message. JD

Hi Neil,

That's interesting. I didn't realise that ME only held the copyright for 25 years.

I would hazard a guess that quite possibly no one owns the copyright to the actual LBSC designs as I doubt anyone would have inherited them. He and Mabel had no children so there would be no family to inherit the copyright. He was very close to Mavis Harriet and she inherited several of his locos, including his own Tich and of course, Ayesha (now owned by the N25GA). but I wouldn't think he would have passed the copyright onto her.

The Association has been given quite a few sets of his original pencil drawings for his well know designs in all the gauges. I haven't had chance to go through them all yet to see exactly what we have, but off the top of my head we have the drawings for Virginia, Betty, Pamela, Iris, Petrolea, Miss Ten to Eight, Netta, and several 2½" gauge designs including Rose.

They are all in very fragile condition but I intend to scan them when time permits before they disintegrate altogether. Not an easy task as they are pencil on what looks like lining paper so the contrast is poor.

LBSC always used to say that he was a terrible draughtsman but some of his drawings are a work of art and well worth hanging on the wall. Apparently, he used to send odd drawings to his friends as a present. The drawings for Rose were given to us by a gentleman in the USA and he had acquired them from someone else etc.

We do hold copies of the drawings for virtually every 2½" gauge design that ever appeared but we do take care not to sell copies of those that we know are sold by others such as Reeves or GLR Kennions. We hold a few that I think ME have lost over the years and seem to have disappeared from sale e.g. Nigel Minor.

When Bonds of Euston Road closed they passed all their remaining castings and patterns onto us and gave us permission to use their 2½" gauge designs so I suppose you could say we now hold the copyright to all of the Bonds 2½" gauge designs.

John

An interesting sounding project, with a number of potential issues- not least the copyright.

I have just bought the words and music of "Bat" (0-gauge 4-4-0) from Tee Publishing, along with the drawings from GLR Kennions. While I haven't found any actual differences between these, they have clearly both been drawn at different times. Presumably this means that while 'X' company may be happy for you to 'reproduce' the drawings for whatever purpose, 'Y' company may not be, or may have different copyright limits? Did Curly update or revise his designs? Did others 'tidy up' drawings, or tweak any misunderstanding for clarity, thus with complications as to ownership?

I'm modelling the Bat (or Flying Mouse if you read some of his articles) in Fusion 360 as the inner masochist wants to try the full Stevensons Link valve gear rather than slip eccentric and as a first model it takes some thinking about... What format drawings are you aiming for? Full parametric for editability? Sketchup for cheap everyday viewing? DXF for 'digital' 2d representations of the original drawings? Or sexy model for rendering as your example?

Richard,

You will often find that there are more than one set of drawings for many of the LBSC designs. Kennions (as it was then) produced their own drawings as did Model Engineer. Donaldson and Piper also did them. Unfortunately, there are often quite a few differences between them!

John

Edited By John Baguley on 17/08/2017 20:09:48

John- if each supplier can redraw and make fine alterations- will each have their own copyright (potentially out of date) while design rights may be entirely separate from the copyright of each publication. Presumably a digital model authored based on the content of a hard copy 'analogue' drawing may may have to come under more general rights of design than the copyright?

Dean,

Not sure if you are nearby to Bristol this weekend, but the BSMEE Model Engineering Exhibition has a plan to get as many LBSC designed locos together as possible- could be a useful point of contact to people who may have less common locos, who presumably have/had drawings for them too...

**LINK**

Thank you everyone for your input, this is going to be a bit of a headache I can see.

I had planned on using more modern standards such as ISO threads (or something that in general would be found around the world) and for the models that are based off of real locomotives, using drawings of the real locomotive to help fill in the gaps.

Aside from that, whether the design is great or flawed, I don't care- I want to draft it as close to what Curly did as possible. Perhaps if there is a commonly used correction of one of his designs I would include that as well.

The working title for this project is the "Words and Music of LBSC".

I'll type a longer response, at the moment I am on a break at work.

Thank you so much!

Copyright for literary persists for 70 years after the death of the author. I remember attending a conference in 1995 at which this issue was raised, at the time when the Alice in Wonderland books were about to go out of copyright. Aspects of the 1995 Act were somewhat controversial, but the basic rule is that for literary works copyright continues to exist for 70 years after the death of the author.

Marcus

Regarding the copy right issue:

I'm hoping (key word) that since the drawings are technically just based off of his drawings that I wont run into any trouble. Realistically I don't want to alter them TOO much, but there are drawings where there are some rather.... "would be nice to know details" missing, dimensions missing, etc. I intend to use drawings from the prototypes to fill in the voids on the prototypical models.

I'm not as worried about designs that are currently being sold by Kennions, Reeves et al.
More of the obscure designs that aren't commonly seen or heard about very much would be the concern.

I'd imagine that this would be a legal nightmare, I have no idea how the British legal system works, I have never even been to the UK, nothing. In fact, I live in the most opposite place to the UK, it's always REALLY hot here in Yuma, Arizona, and the sand dunes not far from here were used to film the desert sequences from the Star Wars movies.

What should I do?
Neil- I think that you would have all the wisdom on this topic.

It's a mess, isn't it. Nothing will be truly settled until 2037!

Any of the ME designs redrawn by the company then sold as plans would still be copyright, but held by the companies we sold the rights to the plans to.

As pointed out even when a plan is redrawn LBSC still held design rights....

Dean I doubt you would get in any trouble if you did it for your own benefit and shared only with a few friends.

The issues these days is that anything electronic will 'escape into the wild'. Apparently the author of the Twighlight(!) books had years of problems after a 'friend' put an early draft of one of her books online.

The truth is, I don't know and obviously I am in a position where I can't sanction anything that isn't completely in line with the law. MyTimeMedia is a publisher and we have to be very careful to respect other publisher's copyright as we expect others to respect ours.

Neil

P.S.

We don't know if LBSC had any surviving relatives or not, but if he didn't then the copyright is with the crown estate:

If there are no surviving relatives

If there are no surviving relatives who can inherit under the rules of intestacy, the estate passes to the Crown. This is known as bona vacantia. The Treasury Solicitor is then responsible for dealing with the estate. The Crown can make grants from the estate but does not have to agree to them.

If you are not a surviving relative, but you believe you have a good reason to apply for a grant, you will need legal advice.

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 18/08/2017 07:28:33

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 18/08/2017 09:27:03

Just to add a few further details...

LBSC died on 5th November 1967 aged 84 so this year marks the 50th anniversary of his death.

His wife Mabel died in 1972.

LBSC bought 121 Grange Road, Purley Oaks around 1934 together with the nearby plot of land where the 'Polar Route' was constructed.

The house was not sold till after Mabel's death though she had been in a nursing home for awhile.

A Grant of Probate/Letters of Administration would have been required to sell the house. If there was a Will then that would be attached to the Grant of Probate and is a public document and these days a copy can be bought online for £10.

The Will will indicate who inherited LBSC's various copyrights.

LBSC had a younger brother Rudolph who did not die until 1989.

So lots of avenues for further research.

There are different types of UK copyright. LBSC would have multiple copyright in artwork, literature, and design.

It is often thought that LBSC 'worked' solely for Model Engineer magazine. This is not correct, and he wrote for and had designs for miniature steam locomotives published in a number of other publications (one of which English Mechanics was bought by Model Engineer).

He also designed a number of locomotives specifically for certain model engineer suppliers - perhaps the best known of which is GWR 3.5"g 'Lickham Hall' for A J Reeves. The successor to Reeves owns the copyright to this design.

LBSC also built a number of miniature steam locomotives which were never published as designs. Among these are perhaps his most interesting and brilliant creations such as his famous 'Tugboat Annie', and 'Grosvenor'.

I was always under the impression that what LBSC wrote and designed for ME became the copyright of ME. Neil has mentioned ME's current copyright policy but we are here dealing with the original owner of ME and it's successor over the period 1924 to 1967. There is some evidence for my impression when English Mechanics was bought out by ME. Also, Don Young was very careful to retain copyright in his designs and artwork, though I expect ME holds the copyright to his writings for ME.

I was also under the impression that if say Reeves or Kennions sold drawings for a LBSC designed loco that had first appeared in ME then they could only do so if licensed by ME.

Note that Dean is in the USA not the UK.

Cheers,

Julian

Edited By julian atkins on 18/08/2017 08:51:23

Did not know that, It's not far from me and my brother used to live a couple of roads away.

It is very difficult to be clear on that. The current agreement does not transfer full copyright, it assigns an unalienable right to publish and publish again and an exclusive right to first publication. The author/originator retains their copyright and can republish after we do, but can't stop us republishing.

Our copyright is in the magazine and how the plan was set, so an author can't publish our magazine articles as his own, for example, he would have to have his original work set for publication again or seek our agreement. This would apply to LBSC plans redrawn for a magazine.

I have no idea what the original agreement with authors of that period would have been, but if we were transferred rights for plans, all of our plans - whether LBSC or otherwise and regardless of source were sold on to Traplet and their successor, so in a sense this has now become their problem to unravel, not MyTimeMedia's. Phew!

In the case of an employee of the company (as was the case with Martin Evans for some time) then full copyright in the ME plans would have been with the publisher.

Neil

No, I know for a fact that some loco designers sold the rights to their plans/designs to different companies and this continues to be the case. There was an instance where an earlier editor of ME started republishing a loco plan in ME and had to stop as the rights were with another company. Another example was the Nemmet Lynx where the plan rights were bought from the author's estate.

Neil

I,v got a few copies of "English Mechanics", and there are two locomotives in the copies I have, Jenny Lind, and Green Arrow, this was in 1937. In 1949 there is Roedean. Other locos Princess Royal, 8.35 To The City, 2537, Princess Marina, Caterpillar, Miss Hasty, 4561,S.15, Cracker, Gwen FLMS, 1695, W.D,, L.M.S. Compound. These locos from an add in 1941.

Ian S C

If 3D models of LBSC's locomotives are created, and put on a website for others to look at, then is that a problem as far as copyright is concerned?.

This being no different in effect than constructing a model, then comprehensively filming it, and posting it on Youtube.

Allowing for the model to be downloaded though, That is a different matter altogether.

Ron