Persecution of OneWorld is a pastime

As wind once again wreaks havoc with the race schedule, some further drippings from the America's Cup, a week after the great Sailing Witch Trials against Seattle's OneWorld Challenge:

"Raw deal:" They're two words being widely used to describe OneWorld's "permanent penalty point" — the requirement that they start every remaining Cup racing series with a built-in, one-race disadvantage. The judgment is believed to be the first of its kind in an event historically rife with harsh penalties and questionable fairness.

Opinions on OneWorld's level of guilt are all over the map, and sound arguments can be made by reasonable people each way. But a growing number of key players in the sailing world are calling the OneWorld penalty a farce, because current Cup residency rules have made inter-syndicate knowledge transfers (OneWorld's transgression) inevitable.

One of the most significant voices is that of Olin J. Stephens, widely considered the dean of America's Cup yacht design. Stephens, the designer of six Cup-winning yachts, this week publicly deemed the OneWorld penalty "unjust and unfair."

His simple reasoning: Intellectual property such as sailboat designs and other professional works historically have belonged to the designer, not his or her employers.

Thus, by extrapolation, OneWorld's ex-Kiwi designer, Laurie Davidson, had not only the right, but obligation to apply his years of Team NZ knowledge to OneWorld's boats. And those design records belong to Davidson — not his most recent employer.

"Certainly in no profession can experience or the details which it has been built (from) be wiped from memory," the retired Stephens wrote in a commentary on the Louis Vuitton Cup Web site. "I, with most professionals, kept notes in a book. Today, for most of us, the computer is an extension of the mind as well as a high-capacity notebook."

Other sailing aficionados chimed in this week on "Scuttlebutt," a respected sailing newsletter, suggesting that punishing one syndicate for using ideas generated by employees who once worked for another was hypocritical at best — and fraught with the potential for endless litigation at worst.

"It is ludicrous for clients to believe that, by paying a fee, that the design ideas created for that fee will be fixed in time, and will never be developed for any other venue," wrote architect Bruce Bonine. "If that were true, then we would never see improvements in any aspect of our life."

It's an interesting debate, with large ramifications: Should the event just accept cross-syndicate transfers as an inevitable part of the game, or revisit residency and employment rules to restrict team-hopping between Cups?

Fair play, Down-Under style: Much to the dismay of many OneWorld employees, many of them native New Zealanders, the team's courtroom hazing has been matched by even rougher treatment in the hometown press.

Even with the matter supposedly settled, The New Zealand Herald, the nation's daily newspaper, continues to pump out near-daily headlines describing OneWorld's supposed wanton pilfering of "Team NZ secrets." A new height was reached with this weekend's edition, which included a special graphic depicting exactly what boat parts the Seattle syndicate might have "stolen" by possessing other teams' materials.

Not that we're opposed to a bit of muckraking. On the contrary. We'd just like to see at least one Kiwi journo muster the stones to at least acknowledge the home team's significant role in the scandal: Team NZ officials, invited by the arbitration panel to offer more detailed complaints against OneWorld after the Seattle team essentially pleaded guilty to minor offenses months ago, declined to do so. Why should they? All they had to do was wait a few months, then quietly leak the same dirt — all later refuted by the panel — to a desperate challenger like Team Dennis Conner once the event was half over.

Similarly, nary a journalistic finger has been lifted in Auckland to question how it is that favored sons Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, the cockpit occupants of New Zealand's 1995 and 2000 Cup-winning boats, managed to literally pick up and move their entire sailing operation to their own Swiss-billionaire-backed challenge — apparently without taking a single shred of proprietary Team NZ knowledge or materials with them.

For the record, we're not the first, or only, ones to notice the blinders. Yachting World's Tim Jefferey recently opined from Auckland:

"It's really rather curious. Yes, most days of the week the America's Cup is the biggest story in this tiny island nation. And yet in the reporting of the panel's sanction on Craig McCaw's and Paul Allen's Seattle team, nowhere will you find the headline: 'Laurie Davidson exonerated: OneWorld's boats not copies of Team New Zealand's!' ''

Don't hold your breath.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.