Originally Posted by ffkiwi

No mchandrayan I am not offended-but I will make some points in rebuttal

i. are you a principal of Aurora or partner of Mr Suresh Kumar and have you personally sighted the original document of sale between Mr Kumar and Mills Bros or Ayling industries? (or an cerified authenticated copy] If you haven't then all you're saying is also just opinion or hearsay. Without the original document which will spell out in excruciating detail exactly what items were being sold, both physical and intellectual you are speculating.

ii. the Mills patents were held not by Mills-but by Mr AL Hardinge, who became their general manager-and what residual retention of rights would have occurred is unclear. What the exact legal position would have been regarding transfer of the various intellectual rights-trademark, name etc after Mills was taken over by Ayling Industries is equally unclear. It may be that Ayling did not own proprietorial rights some of what they subsequently sold on to Mr Kumar-that is if Ayling Industries group was the vendor as opposed to Mills Bros. [Equally pertinent here is that model diesels were only ONE of Mills Bros model products-they were also active in the area of model train rolling stock, track and equipment-which I imagine if sold similarly, would have been sold to a different buyer] In takeover situations not everything is necessarily acquired.

iii. I should like to see some evidence that the Irvine Mills were authorised by Aurora-particularly in light of the fact (and this IS fact not opinion) that NONE of the key parts are interchangeable between the two 75s (though you can exchange complete carb assemblies but not subparts)-if any such authorisation/licensing took place I would expect to see some reference to it in the literature accompanying the engine-which is the normal practice.

iv. I doubt that Indian commercial law is applicable or enforcable outside of India so I doubt that Aurora would have had any legal recourse against the Doonside project, the Irvines, the Russian made ones or the CS offerings. The two key principals behind the Doonside Mills-Ivor F and Gordon Burford-have left us, so we have no idea what discussions about licensing, copyright etc may or may not have occurred.

v. I would not get too fixated on 1970 as the critical year-mention of the Indian acquisition of Mills was made in Aeromodeller in the early 1970s-but when the negotiations commenced and when the actual transfer of rights occurred is unclear-see point 1 again-said document/documents will certainly be dated. The negotiations might have gone on for some time. Again IIRC it has never been clearly stated (in the modelling press at least) from what commercial entity Mr Kumar acquired the rights to continue production. The last reference I can find to Ayling Industries Group suggests they were still around in 1977 in some form-but they were clearly a classic corporate-buying and selling subsidiaries, merging and demerging-so what became of Mills Bros (Model engineers) plc over the years is a bit of a mystery....

vi. regarding Woking models, IIRC at the time Aeromodeller stated that 'remaining stocks of spare parts for these engines are now held by Woking Models'-there was never any suggestion that Woking Models were assembling engines from spares and then selling them. Since Mills Bros were located in Woking it makes a degree of sense that the local retail model shop would be a sensible place to offload the remaining stocks. Equally it was never stated that Woking Models had purchased the remaining spares-merely that they could be obtained from them....perhaps the money still went back to Mills?

ChrisM

ffkiwi'