as a renowned scientist, Soong would have made his work peer-reviewable and replicable
Actually, quite the opposite - Soong, once burned, was mortally afraid of being ridiculed, and went to great pains to
hide his work from his peers. Neither Lore nor Data were made public, as Soong kept tinkering with them (despite both displaying what must amount to perfection as far as artificial intelligence goes); the only reason even Data was ever "released" was because the Crystalline Entity attack forced Soong's hand.
Whether Soong's paranoia made him miss out on some IP rights regarding his work, we don't know. And Soong probably didn't care: whatever the economic reality of the future, Soong would be one of the "haves", in no need of financial compensation, and could defend his intellectual primacy here without the need for courts of law.
I agree that making positronic brains or at least brain components is not rocket science, once you know the tricks. Before Soong, nobody did. After Soong, Data at least did - and no doubt Maddox and others had made sufficient scans to attempt their own copies. Yet turning that tech into working AI systems that can run android bodies clearly takes a lot of work, or Maddox wouldn't have come begging for a piece of Data, and Lal wouldn't have failed. But turning it into something simpler, such as partial brain prosthetics, is doable, and done, as per DS9 "Life Support".
The argument about android armies was a straw man of little consequence: replicators allow for mass production of armies, be they android or human, but clearly this is not worth doing for reason X. If X applies to human armies, it is likely to apply to android armies as well, since we have not been given much reason to think Data would be significantly simpler than biological life.
OTOH, there also seems to exist a reason Y that keeps the UFP from pursuing androids in general, and not just positronic ones. A likely reason is that androids are worthless: if there's a job that requires them, holograms are much better, cheaper and more flexible physical manifestations for the control system (be it an AI-level computer or something much simpler). It's just that Soong considered an android body the perfect way of showcasing his fantastic new positronic brain. Perhaps the forte of positronics is in compactness, and demonstrating that the tech can squeeze a full AI into a humanoid skull was thought by Soong to provide a sufficient wow effect?
In other words, there is no reason whatsoever that Starfleet would not be able to procure Data's plans and replicate model androids at will.
Better still, replicators don't need plans - they can operate blind! We see this in DS9 "Rivals", where a piece of alien tech can not merely be replicated using a regular Cardassian (Ferengi?) food replicator, but also scaled up without (AFAWK) loss of functionality. Shoving Data into an industrial replicator and pressing "COPY" would fill the universe with Datas.
But reasons X and Y would make that futile. Even Maddox doesn't want more Datas; Maddox only wants to know how Data was made and what makes him tick, and greater numbers of the android will add nothing to that equation. (Sure, he could replicate one extra Data he could then vivisect, but there he would no doubt run into the very same legal complications he faced when trying to vivisect the original Data.)
By the way, another way to avoid Federation jurisdiction is to simply go outside the Federation itself. Data could have taken a shuttle to some nonmember world, disembarked, and resigned his commission.
Certainly; note that Soong went there, too! But fighting in court was the path of least resistance. Had Data tried to go abroad, he might have had to physically fight his way there, burning more bridges than was to his liking.
Also, everything points to Data having had a rather miserable time interacting with wetware until meeting Captain Picard and being drafted to his elite crew. All his discoveries in the field of humanity come in early TNG, despite his Starfleet career spanning more than a decade. Clearly, life without Picard would be much less desirable than life with Picard.
Timo Saloniemi
