@rplst8 posted: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.
Honest questions: Why would Lionel ever do that? Why would they ever give away their technology for nothing in return?
Aftermarket programs often involve quality control requirements on the part of the OEM since the aftermarket product interacts with the OEM product/system. Why would Lionel want the headache of policing an aftermarket program on an antiquated system they are choosing to no longer support?
I, too, am an IP lawyer and agree with the very well articulated analysis from Chaos. Like him, I also find it unlikely that Lionel - a relatively small company with limited resources - would spend any meaningful effort to enforce their remaining IP rights, if any, in regard to technologies they are choosing to abandon, especially if the competitive product is fairly/properly reverse engineered. I also find it unlikely that they’ll denounce any remaining rights in the form of some omnibus license - their current designs may still have evolutions of the original source code.
To me, the barrier to producing replacement products is likely more commercial than legal. If there was still good money to be made producing them, Lionel would probably do so and they could certainly do so less expensively than someone starting from scratch.
My $0.02 worth and it may not be worth $0.02…..
