Ted,
I think your experiencing a rectal/cranial inversion...It was YOU who inferred that guns made by Darne Fils aren't real Darnes...Not me..
I'm the one who refers catagorically to all sliders as "Darne's" ...whether it's by design, patent, or lineage....the same way I call some guns an Anson & Deeley boxlock even though the gun was made in Belgium...just like the rest of America...to American gun collectors, sliders are Darnes of one form or another...
You see Ted, if a sliding breech fixed barrel shotgun were to pass in front of me, and the name on the gun was marked Lebel, I would draw some line of distinction...If the gun says some hardware store name or the name of some finishing house, I would see that as a barreled action built on Darne patents that had EXPIRED and were being produced and distributed by the St. Etienne arsenal to artisans throughout the region, in much the same way the St. Etienne arsenal did when the Verney Carron patents ran out on the Helice.
Sure Verney Carron held the Grip Helico patent, but when it ran out, the design became public domain and the St. Etienne arsenal was free to produce them...and anyone was free to buy them, even Darne...when any or all of of Darne's patents ran out, they too became public domain and anybody could produce the Darne designed guns...
The right to draw the design lines doesn't automatically fall to you...and the fact that I don't have some psychic awareness of YOUR notions hardly seems important to me.
