Military aircraft manufacturers demand royalties for... plastic models!

Ridiculous, there is zero chance of someone 'ripping off' a 777
design by building a model of it. There is no comparison
between marketing a thing that looks like a bigger thing and playing
copyrighted music.

And the basis for that opinion is?

The Boeing 777 didn't just spring to life by magic. While I'm not
necessarily a big Boeing fan, the precise design of that airframe was
the result of thousands upon thousands of hours of work and testing.

Copyright law has been around for a long time, it is in the U.S.
Constitution. It has long been recognized that a person is entitled to
protection when he comes up with a new idea.

If you copyrighted your message (if it is indeed copyrightable), and
someone reproduced it as a part of something that was for financial
gain, you would be entitled to royalties.

If you were to spend your time, money and effort coming up with an
airplane design that you marketed, how would you feel if someone made
tee shirts depicting it or models of it and sold those and made money
on it? Why should they get income as a result of your genius? If a
model maker makes a plastic airplane that doesn't look like something
on the market, he pays no royalties; however, the models that are
valuable are those that copy an existing real airplane. So, why should
the model maker who piggybacks on the efforts of the people who came up
with the idea for the real airplane, spent a fortune testing it and
risked people's lives in flight test, not pay something for the right
to reproduce copies of the original? Seems to me that the model maker
is getting something for nothing if he doesn't pay a royalty,
especially when the models are often extremely accurate.

All the best,
Rick