buttman wrote:
Jim Macklin wrote:
You can work from FAA data, it is public. But you can't
legally copy a manufacturers pages, that is copyrighted.
Also be sure you put make/model and serial number ranges on
the product. Remember you to can be sued if somebody uses
your product and is injured. Talk to your lawyer and
insurance man.

That said, those charts are for speed and convenience, they
are created from mathematical data points by teams of
engineers. That's why you see terms such as "straight line
variation between point" on so many charts.

Even more than that said; as the end user you can scan at
1200 dpi, the charts from you own airplane and they will
print out very big and easy to read.

Good luck, BTW, when I use a performance chart, I always
take the least favorable number if it is too close to call.

Oh, I'm not planning on selling these. They take maybe 1 hour each to
do. I was just planning on putting them up on my website for all to use.


Selling your reproductions insn't the point. Copying them is.

You are infringing on the copyright of the copyright owner as soon as
you reproduce them by any means. I don't believe you can dance around
the issue by refering to the means by which the copies were made.

Making the reproductions public is a worse offence, as you become more
visibly subject to legal action for damages and or loss of income.

The only exception is for product review, a principle which is called
"fair-comment" and allows limited reproduction of copyright material
for the purpose of reviewing the work in question ... typically in the
media. Fair-comment wouldn't apply in your case.

I would't even want to speculate about the liability that you would be
exposing yourself to by proposing that people use your reproductions.
You could make an error, after all.

I suggest you contact the aircraft manufacturer and try to get
permission from them, or try to sell your charts to them.

Otherwise ... keep 'em to yourself. And as you know, technically it's
not legal to use anything other than the actual POH of the aircraft in
its operation.

I came by some of this knowledge the hard way - I had to hire a
copyright and intellectual property attorney to pursue a (bad) client
that illegally used one of my photographs for profit to promote a
professional trade conference. I learned a lot in the process about
copyright and misappropriation of personality and/or image (the model
in the photograph hadn't released the rights to reproduce her image
either to promote the trade show).

Best of luck

PPL-A (Canada)