PAPER BOAT - credits, provenance and trade-mark record ====================================================== WHAT THIS IS ------------ An independent, from-scratch browser toy about the stability of a folded paper boat. Nothing in it is copied from, decompiled from, or derived from any existing product. There is no original piece of software to reimplement: the reference is a paper boat, the fold a child makes from a sheet of newspaper. THE ORIGINAL ------------ The traditional paper boat / newspaper hat has NO known author, no year of invention and no publisher. It is a traditional model. - The earliest evidence of paperfolding in Europe is a picture of a small paper boat in the 1498 French edition of Johannes de Sacrobosco's "Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi". (Wikipedia, "History of origami") - Folding methods are not protectable. Quoting a Japanese court's position: "the method to folding origami is in the public domain; one cannot avoid using the same folding creases or the same arrows to show the direction in which to fold the paper." (Wikipedia, "Origami") - There is no Wikipedia article titled "Paper boat" at all; the MediaWiki API returns "missing" for that title. The fold has no encyclopaedia entry of its own. - The most famous paper boat in fiction is Georgie Denbrough's in Stephen King's "It", which is why this app's course is a rain gutter. - Guinness World Records: "The largest display of origami boats consists of 230,000 boats and was achieved by the Hellenic Olympic Academy (Greece) with the help of 45,000 students, displayed at the Panathinaic Stadium of Athens, in Athens, Greece, on 11 April, 2014." WHAT IS FAITHFUL, AND WHAT IS NOT --------------------------------- Faithful: - The sheet sizes are ISO 216 A-series. An A4 sheet of 80 g/m2 paper weighs 5.0 g, which is the figure Wikipedia's "Paper size" article gives, and the app computes it from grammage and area rather than storing it. - The girth constraint is real. A sheet of paper has a fixed perimeter, so a wider boat is necessarily a shallower one. That single constraint is the whole argument the app makes. - The hydrostatics are the standard ones: BM = I/V, GM = KB + BM - KG, the free-surface correction i/V, the sharp-crested weir discharge for water over the gunwale. Not faithful, and deliberately so: - The hull is PRISMATIC - one cross-section extruded over the length. A real folded boat is close to that amidships and nothing like it at the bow and stern. - The fold is parameterised by one number, the share of the girth spent on beam. A real fold is not a slider. - How far a finished boat splays open (0.64 of the sheet width, in this model) is calibrated to the proportions a folded boat has. No source gives it. - How long paper takes to go limp in water is an ASSUMPTION. Searches found wet-strength figures (wetted paper keeps under 10% of its dry strength) but nothing at all on the time course for untreated newsprint or copy paper. The numbers in the app are calibration. - Roll damping, gust energy, bailing rate and the sag rate are gameplay calibration. Every one of these is tagged, with a source URL where one exists, in the project's facts file, and the app's own Help panel prints the same provenance table. TRADE MARKS - WHAT THE REGISTER SAYS, AND WHAT IS NOT CLAIMED ------------------------------------------------------------- A trade-mark register WAS reachable. The TMview search service answered a POST to www.tmdn.org/tmview/api/search/results on 2026-09-20 (a GET to the same path returns 405, so a register can look dead when it is not). The query "paper boat" returned 65 marks. Verbatim, the ones in the classes a browser game falls under - class 9 (software), class 28 (games and toys), class 41 (entertainment services): PAPER BOAT CA 2045187-00 Registered 2024-12-20 classes 9,14,16,21,24,25,33 proprietor: Whitewater Brewing Company Ltd. paper boat BR 932796710 Registered 2026-01-27 class 41 proprietors: Guilherme Pereira Souza; Lucas Sousa de Almeida PAPER BOAT (LABEL) IN 1762030 Registered 2008-12-10 class 9 proprietor: Vishesh Bhat PAPER BOAT (LABEL) IN 1762035 Registered 2008-12-10 class 41 proprietor: Vishesh Bhat PAPER BOAT. CO 93401981 Registered 1996-01-30 class 28 proprietor: Industrias Chicco Ltda. Paper Boat Pete AU 1847616 Registered 2018-01-09 classes 9,16,25,28 proprietor: Vanessa Dickson PAPER BOAT STUDIO ES M4257442 Registered 2024-12-05 classes 35,41 proprietor: Roger Altimira Ros The Paper Boat Project with device of Paper Boat IN 2883185 Registered 2015-01-14 class 41 proprietor: Mrs. Radha Goenka PAPER BOAT JOURNEYS US 50009063 Filed classes 35,41 applicant: Eduardo Diaz Plain "PAPER BOAT" is also a live registration in other classes in IN, KR, AU, WO, MX, US, AR and MY, and lapsed in several more. The full return, 65 rows, is in the project record. Read plainly: PAPER BOAT is a registered word mark in class 9 (software, in Canada and India) and class 41 (entertainment, in Brazil and India) and class 28 (games, in Colombia). Those are squarely on point for a browser game of this name. NO CLEARANCE IS CLAIMED AND NONE WAS SOUGHT. This is a record of what the register says on one day, not a legal opinion, and not advice. This page uses the words as the ordinary English name of a folded sheet of paper. It is free, carries no advertising, sells nothing, collects nothing and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any proprietor listed above. SOURCES USED ------------ MIT 13.012 Hydrodynamics for Ocean Engineers, Reading #3 (metacentre, BM = I/V, GM = KM - KG, stiff versus tender, GM at 3-5% of beam) IMO Resolution A.562(14), 1985 (the rolling-period formula and its coefficients, verbatim from the resolution PDF; and the deck-edge-immersion heel limit) Wikipedia: Metacentric height, Angle of loll, History of origami, Origami, Paper size, Grammage, Paper, Wet strength, It (novel) ISO 216:2007 (A-series sheet sizes), ISO 536:2019 (grammage) Guinness World Records (largest display of origami boats) TMview (www.tmdn.org/tmview/) for the trade-mark record above Two paywalled sources (ScienceDirect, ASME Digital Collection) returned 403 or a CAPTCHA and are NOT cited; one classification-society note surfaced only as a search snippet and its page could not be re-fetched, so instead of citing it the app TESTED its claim and reports that the claim does not hold for a paper boat. A Guinness record for a "largest folded paper boat" is quoted in search snippets but its page 404s, so its figures are not reproduced here. LICENCE ------- This implementation is released under the MIT Licence; see LICENSE.txt. The facts above are facts. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA 4.0; no Wikipedia prose is reproduced here beyond the short quotations marked as such, only the facts it reports, restated.