Kahle v. AshcroftCollection and Archival of documents of a no-longer-in-existance companies products
originally submitted by Rick Gorton:
In 1893, the George Gorton Machine company was incorporated, and sold various kinds of machine tools. As part of this, they published various sales brochures, manuals, etc.
Sometime in the late 1960's/early 1970's, the company was purchased by a company named Kearney & Trecker; subsequently, they became Cross & Trecker; then went bankrupt (I know the patent rights were assigned to Citicorp); then Trecker was sold to Giddings & Lewis; which in turn was purchased by ThyssenKrupp.
Further complicating things: at some point, some (unknown) set of rights were sold to a company named Lars Machine which eventually was acquired by Famco Machine. I don't know which rights are owned by what company (or if I even have all the right companies...)
I contacted Giddings & Lewis and talked with a market development person about getting access to the old records; and whether or not an offer to buy the rights to all the old Gorton records and rights from them (without either of us knowing anything about what rights and records G&L actually has) would make sense. That person indicated no, as they didn't have the Gorton content in a single central location, nor the staff to investigate. Especially since it would cost them more to hunt the information down than any deal would end up being worth.
As for ads and articles published in trade journals of the era, many (all?) of the relevant publications are also no longer in existance, or their successors have poor records (and will be similarly unwilling to spend lots of time and effort to hunt down details for 'trivial' requests such as mine.
Stifled uses
Rick Gorton:
Initially driven by genealogical interest - the company was started by my great-grandfather, I started to put together as complete a history of the company and its products on the web (gorton-machine.org) This is not simply an academic exercise - the resale market for old Gorton machine tools is real, but documentation regarding them is scant and woefully out-of-date.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out who actually owns what rights to various publications, so I'm
faced with the possibility that if someone contacts me with what appears to be a legitimate claim of copyright ownership on this content, I will have to pull it from my website, and/or be in a position where I am presented with highly unreasonable licensing/rights use fees and terms.
I hope this helps,
Rick