Hi,
I have received the following email from 3DRobotics last night, my Iris quadocopter was already in France, at Fedex office for a delivery at home on monday. 3DRobotics say they cancel my order and will refund me, rhis mean they will ask Fedex to send back to product to the US, why such a decision for all customers ? Why cancelling a shipement when the parcel is nearly at your home ?
Here is the email I have received from 3DR
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Thanks for your order with 3DR. We're writing to let you know that, due to a temporary change in our shipping policies, we're unable to ship orders outside of the US and Canada. We'll be cancelling and refunding your order immediately. We're very sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll let you know when we can resume shipments to your country.
If you have any questions or would like to make modifications to your order, write to us at help@3drobotics.com or call our support line at +1 (858) 225-1414, Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm PST.
Sincerely,
The 3DR Team
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Replies
you may want to consider WHY i feel it necessary to use the nym hotelzululima and why I can talk with such authority about ITAR law and the shifting of same across 3 different regulatory bodies in order to avoid direct court challenges to an unconstitutional body of regulations(such as my own).. been there done that..
hzl
Hi All,
now I am wondering if this will affect flight controller, GPS and drone projects on github, Kickstarter and Indiegogo
ie its simple to arrange all to comply with it all provided no US persons involved with the designs
while CONUS,
US persons working non CONUS is another matter and a US person CONUS working via ssh or xterm/ssh to a foreign server or cloud server may indeed be a case their unconstitutional regulations have not thought of.
Now as to shipping to from canada/mexico internationally? up to 2k(last time I consulted with an attorney about same) was completely legal.. was also quite legal to ship to canada/mexico from a US firm.. only thing restricted in those days was the dirty 7.. ie north korea, libya, etc for export..
also as I referenced above certain dual use and military goods even demilled are forbidden from import to prevent their reconstruction stateside.
Now as to the present difficulties??
3DR WONT be saying ANYTHING until the lawyers say its OK.. that is a fact of life and should NOT be held against 3DR.. its how these matters work once the USG and lawyers get involved.
What caused it??
Could it have been the FAA reaching out to BIS to teach all of us "citizens" an object lesson about attempting to defy our masters?
OR it could have been a domestic competitor in the military/intelligence space
taking large income hits because of the price disparity between 3DR gear and "professional" gear and wanting to slow them down via falsely claiming IP infringement issues prior to themselves introducing civilian systems
(closed source of dubious provenance ) themselves...
and all of this is surmisal.. but we can be sure its export control issues as their management has already stated same..
HZL(wearing a triple thickness tin foil hat!!)
OMFG you are right.. was it EVER tin foil even in the 1950's i think it was aluminum.. hmm I have a roll of copper foil from the GPS ground plane experiment! will fab a hat out of that and add a diode white noise source to help block out the CIA/NSA/BIS microwaves they are beaming at me 24/7 from my iphone no less!!! tongue firmly in cheek hzl
If 3DR have indeed been instructed to stop sending their products overseas, I doubt that they will be too worried about it, as they have a home market in the U.S. and Canada which they will continue to serve – and if anything I wouldn’t be surprised if this “glitch” has increased their sales in those markets. I imagine they will make an announcement regretfully informing their overseas customers of this new development and reassure them that they will be implementing procedures to allow for export applications to be processed in the future, blah blah blah.
It needs to be remembered that 3DR is a separate commercial entity, independent to DIYDrones, with interests in commercialising open source products, and at this stage, it's probable 3DR has been asked nicely by a US agency to comply with export regulations.
Many in the DIYDrones community may argue that the community is open source and contributions have been made by individuals from across the world, and that ardupilot and pixhawk should not be export controlled, however this is just naive – export regulations exist, and these ‘products’ being sold by 3DR are subject to those export regulations as 3DR is an American company headquartered in Berkeley.
The discussion about whether ardupilot is subject to export control has been discussed at length in the past. I’m actually quite surprised at some of the responses to this thread as it appears a few people are genuinely unaware of these issues, and probably a reflection on how quickly this community is growing. There used to be a series of DIYDrones podcasts some time ago, and Chris Anderson responding to a question once said that if export regulations were to become a problem with relation to their then growing business of making and selling ardupilots, then they would simply move to Mexico. Only on the basis of that comment, I would suggest that as Chris is the CEO of 3DR, that 3DR has always been aware of its export obligations, and has knowingly flouted U.S. export law. So on that basis, I respectfully have no sympathy for 3DR.
On the subject of why would this happen now, well, Chris Anderson has done a fabulous job in the last few years in mobilising interest in drones and the open source autopilot software development community. However, with this success, I think some issues have developed.
Ubiquitous use of civilian drones for both recreational and commercial purposes has skyrocketed, and it has become increasingly evident to authorities (i.e. FAA) that these little planes are beginning to be used in places which in the past didn’t see ‘model’ aviation, and by individuals not using the requisite amount of common sense and discretion in operating these models. Here I’m referring mostly to long range or excessively high FPV flights and quadcopters in urban and built up areas – and not necessarily 3DR products. Why is this an issue? Well, while Trappy’s court case resulted in a judgment against the FAA, this may have prompted someone to look at other means to influence what this community is doing (remembering that this community has openly supported the outcome of Trappy’s case – and assuming that the FAAs intent was to influence the behaviours of drone users), and how to control the continued proliferation of the little drones. So how does controlling exports impact on drone use within the U.S.? It all depends if 3DR are looking at fines for each occurrence of breaching the export regulations – which would effectively mean they would go out of business, and this would have a flow on effect I imagine on the 3DR paid/sponsored developers, disruption to supply and support and fragmentation of the community.
The other thing which may have influenced all this may have been, put simply, the competition. In an environment of decreasing military spending, established companies wouldn’t be pleased at 3DR exporting products which they themselves wouldn’t be able to export without going through the proper export approvals process. And I’m not just talking about large aerospace defence companies here, but also smaller companies in the same field. It would only take one company to complain to bring this to the attention of the export regulators.
So anyway, all of the above is simply speculative, but that’s just my two cents – following this thread with great interest to see how things develop.
And without being able to export, they would have lost their main contributors and no more updates to APM, MP etc.
Nick! Yes its deja vu all over again. It serves to show how little is known of what has gone before.
Ummm... I donno if its all over...
I think that DIYDrones, the open source autopilot community will be fine... but 3DR the business might have a problem - and like I said before, what I'm saying is speculation...
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