Re: NNG BNSF Appears to be doing a UP

I have gone through some near misses over the years and what I was told by a lawyer(With ties to railroads I might ad), that you can generally NOT be in violation of the copyright laws if you are making it your artistic impression of said subjects. This is somewhat what happened in the Nils Huxtable case(Contact him for details), where UP and Nils battled it out over his Union Pacific Calendar. Nils won some good money there I believe, but I do not know details(haven't seen him in many years).
Anyway I thought I was going to get in some hot water over a subject I shot(Steam Engine), and the above explanation is what I got from the lawyer(Its my artistic impression of that locomotive, and I am not duplicating it in any way). That is if someone were to say build another engine identical to say SP 4449, and number it 4449, then they then would be in violation of whatever copyright law that was in place for 4449.
The Virginia Museum of Transportation is now attempting to copyright the newly rebuild 4-8-4 Class J 611. This is to include license fees for stuff like videos, mugs, and whatever. We will see how that works out but it sounds similar to the UP deal. After the UP situation they kinda backed off the whole campaign, and probably saved face by doing so. Now all they need to do is get a steam engine running again!!!!!
Greg