Copyright on HP service manuals

Clearly I have failed to move along just yet.

Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Are you trying to pick a fight? I have no argument with legal enforcement of copyrights, as I've repeatedly stated, and HP seems to respond favorable when people ask, as I also stated several times above.

But we've been generally exploring the *advisability* of an instrument company unduly restricting the propagation of their old manuals. It's merely an interesting hypothetical question.

Mnay stores where I am have signs posted around Halloween that masks aren't allowed to be worn while you're in their store...

The problem with caller ID is that it's either "phone number and name" or "nothing at all." People such as school teachers have legitimate reasons for not wanting to hand out a return call number, yet with the current caller ID system they can't reveal their identity without doing so.

Isn't that the point? Copyright law is still in the 18th century and should be replaced by something SENSIBLE in the context of the 21st century.

Indeed you did not. Sorry. The line about learning the difference was by Watson A.Name.

Copying and selling the manual is *clearly* a violation. Copying a chapter isn't likely to be. Copying an entire book, even for one's "research" is considered to be in bad form.

Yer an idiot (no surprise here). My argument is simply that *ONLY* they have the right to decide what is to be done with their IP. If they want to be stupid, so be it. Indeed they may not have had control over that IP (apparently not the case). For instance, car manufacturers have sold the reproduction/sales rights for their manuals to a third party.

Apparently HP has rethought their position, so be it. That doesn't change the fact that they have that right.

IP law is certainly broken, but this is *not* an example, IMO.

It is legal.

This leaves me wondering whether to dignify your message with a response. However...

And who among us has denied that? You've been quarreling at great length with things that nobody was saying.

In my opinion it is, because the situation with manuals is like the situation with backup copies of software. It is nowadays explicitly legal to make backup copies of software. The reason is that once you've paid for the software, making and using a backup copy of it does not cause _further_ distribution of the manufacturer's IP -- it merely ensures that you can use the IP you've already paid for.

Someone else pointed out that when you buy an instrument, a manual comes with it. If you lose it and need to procure a copy, you are not further redistribuing the manufacturer's IP. Arguably, the IP stays with the instrument and has already been paid for. And you own the instrument.

I also pointed out that if the manufacturer is not offering these manuals for sale, then the manufacturer is not losing sales when other people copy the manuals. That was my point about copyright lawsuits and damages, to which you have not responded at all. If Agilent wanted to enforce its copyright on an out-of-print manual which was being reprinted in small quantities by others, the judge would ask, "And how much harm is Agilent suffering from this?" If it could be shown that Agilent was actually benefiting from it (suffering negative harm), Agilent would have great difficulty pursuing the lawsuit.

As I said (and you called me an idiot), laws are not computer programs; they don't work just by being written. They work through the mechanism of the courts.

What's legal? Copying an entire book is questionable, "for research". Try copying a CD "for research".

Since you're the one *COMPLETELY* misrepresenting my position, you're the idiot.

You did, by misrepresting my postion. ...at least.

I agree with mc. Your new claim is ironic, because you are the one who's been massively misrepresenting other's folks positions. Certainly you've repeatedly misrepresented my own, despite my direct statements, to the point where I've given up responding, despite my interest in the topic.

Actually, I was thinking of Obi-Wan's line in Star Wars.

See, that's a different issue, with which I have to agree.

By that I refer to companies that choose to make restrictions so tight that the owners of their instruments who are without manuals are screwed. Not Agilent, we see now, but a few others. While they may have the legal right, it's unduly restricting to those who now own their old instruments, bought fair and square.

Copyright is fine. Patents are fine. But their continual extension, both in time and ambit, at the behest of lobbyists for big corporations just contributes to the increasing concentration of assets in fewer and fewer hands.

It's amusing, as corporations grow ever larger, more powerful, and more expansive in what they control, to hear folks defending free enterprise and fairly-compensated innovation of hard-working engineers as if the interests of such individual workers and creators were the same as those of the wealthy stockholders who deploy immensely more power simply by virtue of their wealth. Obviously those interests are not the same, as the current endless tale of "layoffs for the workers equals more profits for the stockholders" continually demonstrates.

Once the right-wing TV personality John Stossel did a show about a little old lady in Atlantic City who refused to sell her house to a huge neighboring casino that wanted to expand. How cruel was the pressure they put on her! How noble was her fight! What sympathy she deserved for being mistreated by that big, mean corporation.....etc., etc., etc., with lots and lots more sentimentality and tear jerking.

And finally (and this was the why Stossel did the story) there was the true message hidden within all the schmaltz: See how important it is that property rights are always defended to the max!!!!

Stossel couldn't have cared less about the woman's suffering, but I'm sure he appreciated her story as a good way of confusing things nicely. What he didn't want the viewers to notice, and I'm sure they mostly didn't, is that it's not usually a sweet little property owner standing up for property rights against larger forces. It's the reverse. Something like 90 percent of all of the private assets of this country are controlled by less than 10 percent of its people (and the latter is a percentage that's continually decreasing these days!). That means that, to the extent that property rights are made increasingly rigid and sacred, our society becomes increasingly a place where more and more power is concentrated in the same fewer and fewer hands.

This is what they've got in several Latin American countries, and the result is constant unrest from the poor and repression, torturing, and killing from the rich. In the US we've been slowly working our way in that direction for the past 30 years.

Sorry, guy, what we're in in the US now is one very, very big case where more "hair of the dog that bit you" (i.e., more, and safer, returns for the stockholders) won't fix things. They've shown for a generation that they only want their profits, period, and in the process of getting them they will be happy to continue throwing away as many workers as they possibly can without regret or compunction.

Cordially

Leonard (the other one)

Remember the Golden Rule: The guy who's got the Gold makes the Rules.