More than a bit of a bugger, however, it's always a risk when dealing with mass media subjects.
It would be nice, yet naïve of me, to hope that one day a media company would be willing to establish a flexible licensing scheme whereby truly penny-ante things like resin models, which will never have more than a few hundred (if very lucky) made for a dedicated fan base who generally proselytise the show like mad, can pay a truly nominal sum which satisfies the need to assert copyright, yet allow these small items to continue to be made for that fan base.
Certainly the existence of 1-200 resin models is not going to impact the potential market for, say, a styrene kit of the same subject, yet the licensing schemes treat them the same, thus shutting out the small guy on subject where no larger licensor may ever show up in that market.
I'd bet a bunch of money that Alan would have been very happy to pay a 1-5 buck fee on each model to use the design and we'd be happy to pay it to get a model of the "mid-level Exploratory Vessel". And, if an injection company were to put out a kit of said model, we'd all run out an buy at least one of those, too.
Such a pity. I understand why. Setting up a license agreement with a small guy, like Fantastic Plastic, wouldn't garner a net return to even cover the cost of the lawyer writing the letter, much less drafting a proper agreement, so it's far faaaaar easier and cheaper to simply shut the small guys down.
But the advertising benefits of the word of mouth for shows like this is never considered and given the ground swell social media exposure good builds get, it's not out of hand to wonder if they are not doing themselves an actual disservice by this approach.
Oh well, one can dream.
Paul
