Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/03/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 08:16 AM 3/27/2001 -0500, Dante A. Stella wrote: >Theft is theft, and you are making artificial distinctions. Trespass vis et armis is >not the basis for the use of someone else's intellectual property, whether you are >Soviet or Japanese. The Soviets got away with it (1) because they were not exporting >to the West,, (2) no one cared to rattle their cage, and (3) everyone was >Leica-obssessed. The Japanese got away with it because the Americans let them. The Soviets were awarded the tooling and intellectual properties of the Carl Zeiss Jena works by the Inter-Allied Committee on Optical Reparations; its chairman, Col Carl Nelson, lives now in St George, Utah, and was a guest speaker several years back at an LHSA meeting. He can fill in the details if you are interested. The British, similarly, were awarded the Volkswagen works, which they ended up declining as a bad business (!) and the French were given the Saarland for ten years. The very term "theft" implies an illegal activity. It is hard to see how the Soviet acquisition of Zeiss technology and equipment, blessed as this was by the US, UK, and French governments, constituted an "illegal" activity. The situation in Japan is far different, but the archives will reveal much detailed discussion of this point. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!