@Professor Chaos posted:But if you're the type that doesn't want to ever risk a threatening letter from the copyright holder, then your actual legal rights don't matter at all and you shouldn't do anything without permission from Lionel. There's nothing on the planet that can stop someone from making a frivolous allegation of copyright infringement against you, even if it would be laughed out of court in seconds.
And therein lies the rub.
Often companies look the other way (or don't notice) until you start to make anything that could qualify as a profit, and then sic their lawyers on you.
If Lionel is not going to produce these parts anymore, one thing that could alleviate this concern is either a public statement that people are free to develop their own aftermarket products for TMCC and early Legacy parts OR to release the source code with a open source license. My recommendation would be to use the GNU GPLv3 license, so that everyone can benefit from any future enhancements to the source code.
