Who 'owns' aircraft designations?

[robunos]

Who 'owns' aircraft designations?
I've been following a thread over on RCGroups.com, and the following story has been posted. It seems a small business attempted to market a simple flying model of the Lockheed P-38. He then received a nasty letter from Lockheed, on the grounds that they held copyright, not only on the company name, and the name 'Lightning', but also the designation P-38.
Now I've always thought that the service designation, assigned as it is by the government, was purely for the use of the military, and therefore would not be copytrightable. Can anyone enlighten me futher?


cheers,
Robin.

 

[mithril]

sounds questionable to me. they can obviously claim the company name, but "lightning" is a fiarly common word and used for a lot of other things. and the designation P-38 has been used for other things not related to Lockheed (such as military can-openers)
given the number of companies producing P-38 fighter replica's and using P-38 fighter replica's in games, computer software, and so on, it's hard to see why a simple model would elict such a response.

 

[flateric]

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/contact/disclaimer.html
http://www.trademarkia.com/p38-lightning-76269978.html


all top plastic kits makers pay royalties to aircraft makers as you know

 

[Stargazer]

Scary. However the copyright holds only inasmuch as the terms "P-38" and "Lightning" are placed next to each other. If anyone decides to do an "F-38 Lightning" or a "P-38 Nightling" then logically they are in their right to do so...

What I know from the French side of things (but which I believe holds true all over the world when it comes to copyright) is that the use of a regular noun as a brand name can only be protected against commercial uses applying to products of similar nature. In other words, though I probably couldn't market a new aircraft as the "Lightning," there would be no such forbidding if it were a brand of, say, chewing gum (think of the Mustang aircraft and the Ford car, for instance).

If copyright laws had been that stringent from the early days, English Electric could not have called its jet fighter the Lightning in the 1950s as they did, for a start!