Ben Beneke

Hi to all train fans! A 1000steine-member pointed out this thread, and as my name (and YouTube Nickname) got quoted, I wanted to give some explanation and feedback. In general my designs got stolen pretty often in the past 15 years. And this has been a really annoying issue to me. Whenever this has happened, it has easily cost me several hours of work that went away from my hobby devoted time. I hated that. I realized I did not loose any money although a theft sold my property and made a win. When argueing with "thieves" about their behaviour, I found that they were never willing to let me partizipate from their wins. But most of them where in fact willing to give part of their wins away for charity donations instead. I kind of formalized this in communication with "thieves". Since nearly 5 years I have an agreement with a person who is licenced to sell instructions after my creations. Since they are officially available, there is hardly any troble for me any more. In some cases my "licenced" copies have been a victim of piracy, but that is an act my licence taker is taking care of. So he keeps my back free. I have more time for my hobby since then. The shown links to ebay user "YonLev" are about these models, which are sold with my full support and under respect of all my legal rights. Yoni is a Co-AFOL from Israel and his chareer started in fact with him selling some of my models as brick-made copies without my permission. After a brief but harsh discussion we came to a better understanding of each others point and he agreed to behave in a way, where we all could be in a win-situation. The deal is: He gets permission to sell my creations. He pays a "licence" fee into charity orgaizations (basically focussed on kids topics). The height of that licence fee is depending on the share of our intelectual work involved. It's more where I have created a instruction myself. it's a little less where I have only a CAD-model published. It's just a very small fee, when Yoni created the CAD model himself after Brickshelf pictures of my models. Customers can now actually buy plans of my models in high quality (higher than I am willing to supply for free). Charity organizations get an amazing sum of licence fees as donations (we are speaking about 4-digit US$-numbers). I have by far less trouble with stolen designs of mine, since there is an official source on market now. Yoni won James Mathis for a similar "contract" as I have in place with him. These copies of my models are 100% ok for me. No rights are harmed. I can just recommend this as a perfect solution for anybody else. Yoni is a grat person and a LEGO fan who uses his income out of this (being even higher than the charity part) to pay his spendings for the hobby. But he invented this business. He operates the ebay shop and deals with customers complaints. So I am fine with this. Best Regards, Ben Beneke